April 24, 2020
Under a new agreement, AMD will supply upgraded graphics accelerators for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Corona supercomputing cluster.
Corona vs. coronavirus
Lawrence Livermore’s aptly named Corona supercomputer has joined in the battle to fight the deadly coronavirus.
LLNL has turned to AMD and Penguin Computing to upgrade Corona. The 2018 system, named for the total solar eclipse of 2017, will nearly double in peak performance to 4.5 peak petaflops.
AMD will supply its accelerators to the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) — but in return, AMD will get an unspecified number of Department of Energy compute cycles in the future. These compute cycles will be used for a "variety of purposes," including for COVID-19 HPC Consortium-approved research, but also commercial development efforts.
“It is well-known that AMD is a key partner in the upcoming delivery of the first NNSA exascale-class system, the Hewlett Packard Enterprise El Capitan supercomputer,” Michel McCoy, director of LLNL’s Advanced Simulation and Computing program, said.
Sierra was one of six Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory supercomputers to make the latest TOP500 List of the most-powerful supercomputers in the world. Sierra held on to the No. 3 spot, achieving 94.6 petaFLOPs on the High Performance LINPACK (HPL) benchmark. LLNL’s presence was bolstered by the addition of Ruby, a recently announced computing cluster that hit 3.7 petaFLOPs on the HPL, ranking it No. 79 in the world. Photo by Randy Wong/LLNL
Sizing up COVID-19 response
The COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium is developing processes for measuring progress and publicizing results on its research projects, which already have begun.
The group was convened by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to speed the work of coronavirus researchers, which include members from government (including Lawrence Livermore ) industry and academia.
One member of the consortium, DOE’s national laboratories, boasts the No. 1 and No. 2 fastest supercomputers in the world: Summit and Sierra, the latter of which is housed at Lawrence Livermore.
DOE’s Exascale Computing Initiative, which is independent from the consortium, is using the department’s work with the National Cancer Institute and genomics project that lend themselves well to COVID-19 research to develop a fast, scalable tool for assembling genomic data fragments. The tools can be useful in understanding how the microbiomes of the lungs and digestive system can be affected by COVID-19.
Ben Santer
A first-person peek at climate
Atmospheric scientist Ben Santer is internationally recognized for his contributions to climate science, including the historic conclusion of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report in 1995 of the “discernible human influence on global climate.”
His research at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory focuses on evaluating climate models, using statistical methods in climate science and identifying “fingerprints” — both natural and anthropogenic — in observed climate records.
He is the recipient of the 2019 Sigma Xi William Procter Prize for Scientific Achievement, which has been annually awarded since 1950, with past recipients including conservation biologist Stuart Pimm, nuclear chemist Darleane C. Hoffman and paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould. American Scientist’s Robert Frederick spoke with Santer about the current state of climate modeling, ongoing challenges and what he finds encouraging. See the full interview.
LLNL researchers and collaborators have used an additive manufacturing technique, called cold-spray deposition, to create thermoelectric generators that can harvest waste heat — a huge untapped resource — from previously inaccessible sources.
So hot, you're cool
The U.S. industrial sector churns out 13 quadrillion BTU in waste heat every year and only recaptures about 3 quadrillion of it.
A lot of it could be reclaimed through the science of thermoelectricity, if a new twist on something called cold-spray technology makes its way out of the lab and into the world.
Cold-spray technology is commonly used in industrial applications including repair work, corrosion resistance and other surface treatments. It involves introducing tiny metal particles into a supersonic gas and slamming them onto a metal surface, where the impact plasters them into a seamless coating.
Cold-spray has been slow to catch on for thermoelectric applications, but that could change thanks to new research from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in a partnership with the Virginia-based company TTEC Thermoelectric Technologies.
The team concluded that cold-spray deposition can fabricate bulk pieces of thermoelectric bismuth-telluride on a wide variety of substrates, without loss of structural integrity, demonstrating that cold-spray is a viable alternative to traditional manufacturing approaches for thermoelectric materials.
Coal use dropped by 14 percent in 2019 compared to the previous year.
Coal is brought down a notch
The 2019 U.S. energy flowcharts released by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory show that overall energy use decreased by 1 percent compared to 2018 usage.
The numbers represent “quads” or quadrillion BTUs, with the total consumption totaling 100.2. Other notable highlights include wind energy increased by 10 percent, solar energy jumped by 8 percent and coal decreased by 14 percent.
In 2019, coal dipped by 14 percent in one year. It is the least efficient at the power-generating point and also the worst for carbon production per watt. Coal was down 5 percent last year and it looks to be down again next year as more and more coal plants are replaced by gas — or even better solar and wind.
