Perlmutter Will Process Data From the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI)
To make the world’s largest 3D map of the Universe, the Perlmutter will use data from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic (DESI). DESI is an instrument used to capture pictures of deep space and can capture more than 5,000 galaxies in one picture.
In a post on the NVIDIA blog, the company stated that using the power of NVIDIA’s A100 Tensor Core GPUs, researchers can process the images from on night so that they know where to point DESI the next time.
Perlmutter is significantly faster than earlier systems:
The primary motive behind the 3D map is to “shed light on dark energy,” which is said to be behind the continuous expansion of the universe. The supercomputer has been named after Saul Perlmutter, a scientist who won the 2011 Nobel Prize for his research on dark energy.
Scientists also plan to use Perlmutter’s computing prowess to create better biofuels and batteries by analyzing atomic interactions. According to NVIDIA, traditional supercomputers are “barely able” to process the math required to create simulations of atoms over a few nanoseconds.
But with NVIDIA’s new supercomputer, scientists are planning to do just that.
Software Is Essential in Perlmutter
While Perlmutter packs cutting-edge hardware, the software is an integral part of the supercomputer as well.
NVIDIA has been focusing on AI for a long time and with Perlmutter, the company believes it is right on time for “AI supercomputing.” Scientists believe that AI will play an important role in scientific breakthroughs.
CEO of NVIDIA, Jensen Huang, said:
The blog post states that Perlmutter supports “OpenMP and other popular programming models in the NVIDIA HPC SDK the system uses.”
This, in combination with RAPIDS—an open source code on data science for GPUs, will significantly increase the speed of scientific discovery using data.
