Published , by Chris Jarrard
Published , by Chris Jarrard
Graphics giant Nvidia has big plans for company expansion. A central part of those plans has been to expand into CPU production and the company finally took the wraps off its new design during the GTC 2021 keynote presentation. This new CPU design is ARM-based and will feature prominently in the upcoming Alps supercomputer.
The Alps supercomputer is expected to come online in 2023 and is the result of a partnership between the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS), Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Nvidia. The Alps system infrastructure will replace CSCS’s existing Piz Daint supercomputer and serve as a general-purpose system open to the broad community of researchers in Switzerland and the rest of the world.
It will enable breakthrough research on a wide range of fields, including climate and weather, materials sciences, astrophysics, computational fluid dynamics, life sciences, molecular dynamics, quantum chemistry, and particle physics, as well as domains like economics and social sciences.
The system itself will be built by Hewlett Packard Enterprise as a part of their HPE Cray EX supercomputer product line. It will be built on the NVIDIA HGX supercomputing platform, including Nvidia GPUs, the Nvidia HPC SDK, and the new Arm-based Nvidia Grace CPU.
Nvidia’s Grace CPU is named for Grace Hopper. She is one of the most important figures in the history of computing, having a hand in developing the Harvard Mark I computer and countless contributions to advancements in programming language. She graduated from Yale with a Ph.D. in mathematics and spent her career in the United States Navy.