Case Study: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory achieves 11 Petaflops for COVID-19 research with Supermicro GPU servers

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Expands Corona Cluster to Perform Additional COVID-19 Research

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) needed to rapidly expand its Corona supercomputer cluster to perform COVID-19 research, specifically to run AI and molecular dynamics simulations for identifying therapeutics. Their challenge involved a fast deployment of the latest AMD-based technology, including powerful GPUs, delivered as a fully tested rack-level solution to get capabilities to researchers as quickly as possible. They partnered with Supermicro to acquire the necessary advanced server solutions.

Supermicro provided LLNL with over 120 of its A+ Server 4124GS-TNR systems, each equipped with AMD EPYC processors and eight AMD MI50 GPU accelerators. This solution increased the Corona cluster's performance to over 11 petaflops. The key result was a dramatic reduction in experiment time, cutting some computations from nearly seven hours down to 40 minutes, which allowed data scientists to conduct faster research and converge on solutions quickly. Supermicro's delivery of pre-tested, fully functional racks was critical to the system's rapid and successful deployment.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Trent D’Hooge

Deputy Division Leader for Operations