NVIDIA Grace CPU + Grace Hopper Superchip power 'Venado' supercomputer

It's a huge day for supercomputers, with AMD powering the world's fastest supercomputer -- the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) "Frontier" supercomputer -- and now NVIDIA has announced it is powering the "Venado" supercomputer.

NVIDIA announced last week that Taiwan tech giants were preparing NVIDIA Grace CPU-powered servers, and now we have our first: the new Venado supercomputer that's being constructed by the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The new VENDAO supercomputer is capable of a huge 10 exaflops of peak AI performance.

• Read more: AMD CPUs and GPUs power Frontier, the world's fastest supercomputer

It feels like a little bit of "me too" with NVIDIA's announcement of the Venado supercomputer, but more concrete details will be provided at the International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg, Germany later today. The new AMD CPU + GPU-powered Frontier supercomputer was teased yesterday, and now we have the NVIDIA CPU + GPU-powered Venado supercomputer here today.

• Read more: NVIDIA Grace CPU-powered servers are coming from Taiwan tech giants
• Read more: NVIDIA's new Grace CPU Superchip: 144-core CPU, 600GB of GPU memory

Ian Buck, vice president of Hyperscale and HPC at NVIDIA said: "As supercomputing enters the era of exascale AI, NVIDIA is teaming up with our OEM partners to enable researchers to tackle massive challenges previously out of reach. Across climate science, energy research, space exploration, digital biology, quantum computing, and more, the Grace CPU Superchip and Grace Hopper Superchip form the foundation of the world's most advanced platform for HPC and AI".

Irene Qualters, associate director for Simulation and Computation at LANL said: "By equipping LANL's researchers with the performance of NVIDIA Grace Hopper, Venado will continue this laboratory's commitment to pushing the boundaries of scientific breakthroughs. NVIDIA's accelerated computing platform and expansive ecosystem are removing performance barriers, allowing LANL to make new discoveries that will benefit the nation and society as a whole".

As for the hardware, we know that NVIDIA's new Grace Hopper Superchip is a daughterboard that packs a 72-core Arm-based Grace CPU die with an NVIDIA H100 GPU that packs 900GB/sec of bandwidth over NVIDIA NVLink-C2C interconnect technology. There's also 512GB of LPDDR5x RAM and 80GB of ultra-fast HBM3 memory.