NVIDIA Vera CPU Opens the Era of Agentic Scientific AI at Los Alamos National Laboratory

Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) is partnering with HPE and NVIDIA to build next-generation supercomputers named Mission, Vision, and Veritas. These systems are powered at their core by the NVIDIA Vera CPU, with the goal of accelerating scientific discovery and implementing Agentic AI technology that can perform everything from hypothesis formulation to running simulations.

The new supercomputer architecture consists of the following:

• Based on the HPE Cray Supercomputing GX5000 architecture
• Combines NVIDIA Vera CPU and NVIDIA Vera Rubin GPU
• Applies NVIDIA Quantum-X800 InfiniBand networking

In actual benchmarks, the NVIDIA Vera CPU showed overwhelming performance gains compared to the existing x86-based supercomputer (Crossroads). It recorded 7x performance on the URSA (Universal Research and Scientific Agent) workload and more than 3x performance on the Monte Carlo heat transfer simulation (Branson).

The Vera CPU delivers more than 3x the performance of a single-socket x86 CPU through its custom Olympus core, LPDDR5 memory, and high-speed on-chip fabric, with 4x the memory capacity per core and 6x the memory capacity per node. This allows researchers to obtain faster and more precise scientific results.