artificial intelligence<\/a> and facing supply shortages, the managers in charge of the systems at Sandia National Laboratories, which operates \u200bthe machines at Kirtland and is one of three U.S. labs tasked with developing and maintaining the nation’s nuclear weapons arsenal, are increasingly unsure how they will find computing power for high-precision scientific work like theirs.<\/p>\n“The pressure we’re feeling right now is on the computing front and also from the supply chain,” said Steve Monk, the manager of Sandia’s high-performance computing team, explaining the challenge of getting chips that meet his needs. “Looking to the future, it’s a bit stressful in terms of our ability to deliver to the mission.”<\/p>\n
NEW ENTRANTS INTO CHIP MARKET<\/p>\n
The lab’s predicament shows how the \u200crace for better AI chips is having the unintended consequence of \u2060opening markets once dominated by the big firms to smaller players such as NextSilicon, an Israeli startup whose chips are being tested by a program at Sandia. It also shows the role that Sandia, which worked with Nvidia extensively as the company rose to prominence in supercomputing and is \u2060still collaborating with Nvidia on new memory technology, plays in incubating and shaping new computing technologies.<\/p>\n
One major concern for officials at Sandia is what is known as double-precision floating point computation, a technical term for being able to compute both very large and very small numbers without losing accuracy to rounding errors. For years, Nvidia and AMD pursued leadership in speeding up that kind of computing, landing supercomputing contracts \u200bwith \u200buniversities and government labs.<\/p>\n
But AI work does not benefit from double-precision computing in the same way as \u200bsimulating physics problems. While AMD is releasing a version of its chips \u200caimed at scientific computing, the double-precision performance of Nvidia’s forthcoming Rubin chips has declined by some measures, worrying many scientists in the high-performance computing industry, said Ian Cutress, chief analyst at More Than Moore, a chip consulting firm.<\/p>\n
Daniel Ernst, senior director of supercomputing products at Nvidia, said the company remains committed to scientific computing, aiming to create a balanced chip that can run real-world scientific applications alongside AI work.<\/p>\n
But the shifting chip market has prompted officials at Sandia to test products from newcomers such as NextSilicon, whose chip uses a completely different computing approach than graphics processing units (GPUs) or central processing units (CPUs) from Nvidia and AMD.<\/p>\n
NUCLEAR SECURITY WORK<\/p>\n
On Monday, Sandia, NextSilicon and Penguin Solutions, the firm that helped weave NextSilicon’s chips into a supercomputer, said \u200cthe systems have passed a key technical milestone using a battery of general supercomputing tests that put \u200bthe chips in the running for use in government systems.<\/p>\n
That sets up NextSilicon’s chips for a decision this fall \u200bon whether to start testing the chips with more demanding computing problems that closely \u200bresemble the kind of nuclear security work they would eventually have to handle.<\/p>\n
The NextSilicon chips can perform double-precision computing and are also designed to \u200creprogram themselves on the fly to run more efficiently. NextSilicon’s chips save \u200belectricity by using what is known as a \u200bdata flow architecture that spends less time and energy shuffling data back and forth to the computing system’s memory.<\/p>\n
Sandia’s work with chip firms often helps technology become widespread. Liquid cooling systems for chips were an exotic idea when Sandia started urging Intel, AMD and Nvidia to work on the technology more than a decade ago, and \u200bnow they are common.<\/p>\n
James Laros, a senior scientist at Sandia who \u200coversees a program to test new computing architectures at Sandia, said the work with smaller players like NextSilicon is aimed at ensuring Sandia can always procure the \u200bchips it needs, even if major chip firms shift focus.<\/p>\n
“We have to keep available options to complete our mission, because the mission is not optional,” \u200bLaros said.<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Stephen Nellis in Albuquerque, New Mexico; editing by Peter Henderson and Nick Zieminski)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Stephen Nellis ALBUQUERQUE, New Mexico, May 18 (Reuters) – In a nondescript building on Kirtland Air Force…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":490558,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[261],"tags":[291,13752,289,290,18,19,17,214107,13758,292,124530,204607,6396,82],"class_list":["post-490557","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-albuquerque","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-eire","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-kirtland-air-force-base","tag-new-mexico","tag-nvidia","tag-sandia-national-laboratories","tag-scientific-computing","tag-supercomputers","tag-technology"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116595523998146054","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/490557","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=490557"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/490557\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/490558"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=490557"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=490557"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=490557"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}