Folks agree: accelerated computing is energy-efficient computing.

The Nationwide Power Analysis Scientific Computing Heart (NERSC), the U.S. Division of Power’s lead facility for open science, measured outcomes throughout 4 of its key excessive efficiency computing and AI purposes.

They clocked how briskly the purposes ran and the way a lot vitality they consumed on CPU-only and GPU-accelerated nodes on Perlmutter, one of many world’s largest supercomputers utilizing NVIDIA GPUs.

The outcomes had been clear. Accelerated with NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs, vitality effectivity rose 5x on common. An software for climate forecasting logged positive factors of 9.8x.

GPUs Save Megawatts

On a server with 4 A100 GPUs, NERSC bought as much as 12x speedups over a dual-socket x86 server.

Meaning, on the identical efficiency stage, the GPU-accelerated system would eat 588 megawatt-hours much less vitality monthly than a CPU-only system. Working the identical workload on a four-way NVIDIA A100 cloud occasion for a month, researchers may save greater than $4 million in comparison with a CPU-only occasion.

Measuring Actual-World Purposes

The outcomes are vital as a result of they’re primarily based on measurements of real-world purposes, not artificial benchmarks.

The positive factors imply that the 8,000+ scientists utilizing Perlmutter can deal with greater challenges, opening the door to extra breakthroughs.

Among the many many use circumstances for the greater than 7,100 A100 GPUs on Perlmutter, scientists are probing subatomic interactions to seek out new inexperienced vitality sources.

Advancing Science at Each Scale

The purposes NERSC examined span molecular dynamics, materials science and climate forecasting.

For instance, MILC simulates the basic forces that maintain particles collectively in an atom. It’s used to advance quantum computing, research darkish matter and seek for the origins of the universe.

BerkeleyGW helps simulate and predict optical properties of supplies and nanostructures, a key step towards growing extra environment friendly batteries and digital gadgets.

EXAALT, which bought an 8.5x effectivity acquire on A100 GPUs, solves a elementary problem in molecular dynamics. It lets researchers simulate the equal of quick movies of atomic actions somewhat than the sequences of snapshots different instruments present.

The fourth software within the assessments, DeepCAM, is used to detect hurricanes and atmospheric rivers in local weather information. It bought a 9.8x acquire in vitality effectivity when accelerated with A100 GPUs.

Financial savings With Accelerated Computing

The NERSC outcomes echo earlier calculations of the potential financial savings with accelerated computing. For instance, in a separate evaluation NVIDIA performed, GPUs delivered 42x higher vitality effectivity on AI inference than CPUs.

Meaning switching all of the CPU-only servers operating AI worldwide to GPU-accelerated methods may save a whopping 10 trillion watt-hours of vitality a 12 months. That’s like saving the vitality 1.4 million properties eat in a 12 months.

Accelerating the Enterprise

You don’t must be a scientist to get positive factors in vitality effectivity with accelerated computing.

Pharmaceutical corporations are utilizing GPU-accelerated simulation and AI to hurry the method of drug discovery. Carmakers like BMW Group are utilizing it to mannequin total factories.

They’re among the many rising ranks of enterprises on the forefront of what NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang calls an industrial HPC revolution, fueled by accelerated computing and AI.