{"id":177172,"date":"2023-12-01T08:24:35","date_gmt":"2023-12-01T14:24:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/12\/how-one-national-lab-is-getting-its-supercomputers-ready-for-the-ai-age"},"modified":"2023-12-01T08:24:35","modified_gmt":"2023-12-01T14:24:35","slug":"how-one-national-lab-is-getting-its-supercomputers-ready-for-the-ai-age","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/12\/how-one-national-lab-is-getting-its-supercomputers-ready-for-the-ai-age","title":{"rendered":"How one national lab is getting its supercomputers ready for the AI age"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/how-one-national-lab-is-getting-its-supercomputers-ready-for-the-ai-age2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p><strong>OAK RIDGE, Tenn. \u2014 <\/strong>At Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the government-funded science research facility nestled between Tennessee\u2019s Great Smoky Mountains and Cumberland Plateau that is perhaps best known for its role in the Manhattan Project, two supercomputers are currently<strong> <\/strong>rattling away, speedily making calculations meant to help tackle some of the biggest problems facing humanity.<\/p>\n<p>You wouldn\u2019t be able to tell from looking at them. A supercomputer called Summit mostly comprises hundreds of black cabinets filled with cords, flashing lights and powerful graphics processing units, or GPUs. The sound of tens of thousands of spinning disks on the computer\u2019s file systems, and air cooling technology for ancillary equipment, make the device sound somewhat like a wind turbine \u2014 and, at least to the naked eye, the contraption doesn\u2019t look much different from any other corporate data center. Its next-door neighbor, Frontier, is set up in a similar manner across the hall, though it\u2019s a little quieter and the cabinets have a different design.<\/p>\n<p>Yet inside those arrays of cabinets are powerful specialty chips and components capable of, collectively, training some of the largest AI models known. Frontier is currently the world\u2019s fastest supercomputer, and Summit is the world\u2019s seventh-fastest supercomputer, according to rankings <a href=\"https:\/\/www.top500.org\/news\/frontier-remains-no-1-in-the-top500-but-aurora-with-intels-sapphire-rapids-chips-enters-with-a-half-scale-system-at-no-2\/\">published<\/a> earlier this month. Now, as the Biden administration boosts its focus on artificial intelligence and touts a new executive order for the technology, there\u2019s growing interest in using these supercomputers to their full AI potential.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>OAK RIDGE, Tenn. \u2014 At Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the government-funded science research facility nestled between Tennessee\u2019s Great Smoky Mountains and Cumberland Plateau that is perhaps best known for its role in the Manhattan Project, two supercomputers are currently rattling away, speedily making calculations meant to help tackle some of the biggest problems facing humanity. [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":661,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1490,6,44,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-177172","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-government","category-robotics-ai","category-supercomputing","category-sustainability"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177172","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/661"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=177172"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177172\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=177172"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=177172"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=177172"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}