NVIDIA Vera CPU Powers New Los Alamos Supercomputers for Agentic AI and Scientific Discovery

NVIDIA Vera CPU Opens the Way for Agentic Scientific AI at Los Alamos National Laboratory

Mission, Vision and Veritas supercomputers with Vera CPUs to advance materials simulation, scientific AI agents and molecular design. Mission, Vision and Veritas -- new Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) supercomputers to be built with HPE and NVIDIA -- are tapping NVIDIA Vera CPUs to accelerate scientific discovery, unlocking agentic AI for science. The supercomputers will use the HPE Cray Supercomputing GX5000 architecture with the NVIDIA Vera Rubin platform, combining NVIDIA Vera CPUs, NVIDIA Rubin GPUs and NVIDIA Quantum-X800 InfiniBand networking. Under the planned configuration, Mission will include NVIDIA Vera Rubin GPU nodes and 2,300 standalone NVIDIA Vera CPUs using the HPE Cray Supercomputing GX240 blade. Veritas will feature approximately 1,150 standalone NVIDIA Vera CPUs to complement NVIDIA Vera Rubin nodes. Veritas will arrive alongside Mission and Vision and serve the Laboratory Directed Research and Development program, helping accelerate agentic AI for science. The system will test these technologies for use in larger systems being built out at LANL. Researchers are adding a new tool for science with AI agents that can form hypotheses, choose tools, launch simulations, analyze outputs and refine the next step. LANL's public work on URSA, the Universal Research and Scientific Agent -- running on Venado and soon Mission and Vision -- points in this direction: a modular, feedback-driven AI framework designed to help scientists brainstorm hypotheses, plan experiments, run simulations and analyze results. LANL demonstrated that the Vera CPU delivered 7x higher performance on URSA workloads than the CPUs in the Crossroads x86 supercomputer. Vera CPU for Agents and Simulation In LANL's early testing of NVIDIA Vera CPUs on Branson -- an open source Monte Carlo heat transfer simulation tool -- Vera outperforms the CPUs used in the Crossroads x86 supercomputer by over 3x. These results were made possible by Vera, including its custom Olympus core, LPDDR5 memory and fast on-chip fabric. A single Vera CPU outperforms a single socket x86-based CPU by more than 3x while providing more than 4x the memory per core and 6x the memory per node. Ultimately, this means faster scientific results for LANL. All of the lab's supercomputers were codesigned by hardware architects, system software developers, domain scientists, computer scientists and applied mathematicians -- helping ensure systems are shaped by real scientific workloads, not abstract benchmarks alone. Building on Generations of LANL Systems Mission, expected to be operational in 2027, will be the fifth Advanced Technology System in the National Nuclear Security Administration's Advanced Simulation and Computing program and will replace Crossroads for classified national security workloads. Vision, also expected to be operational in 2027, will serve as a resource for fundamental science, including materials and nuclear science, energy modeling, biomedical research and AI -- letting more scientists test methods, train models and explore ideas before moving into higher-consequence work. The work extends more than a decade of LANL and NVIDIA's deep collaboration on CPUs, from Grace to Vera, using extreme codesign for LANL simulation workloads. The three new supercomputers build on Venado, the HPE Cray EX supercomputer installed at Los Alamos in 2024 with NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper Superchips and NVIDIA Grace CPU Superchips. Learn more about the NVIDIA Vera CPU.

NVIDIA Vera Rubin Delivers World-Class Supercomputers for Science

With 7 Exaflops of AI for Science and 5 Petaflops of Native FP64 Performance, Vera Rubin Packs TOP500 Supercomputing in a Single Rack * NVIDIA Vera Rubin accelerates the world's most demanding HPC workloads including climate modeling, computational fluid dynamics and energy exploration. * NVIDIA Vera Rubin and Vera CPU to bring agentic AI to scientific computing. * Leibniz Supercomputing Centre, National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center and Los Alamos National Laboratory next-generation supercomputers based on Vera Rubin will advance open science, energy exploration, earth sciences and national security. * Global system manufacturers Bull, Dell Technologies, GIGABYTE, HPE and Supermicro announce custom high-density Vera Rubin supercomputing systems with up to 144 GPUs per rack. ISC High Performance 2026 -- NVIDIA today announced the NVIDIA Vera Rubin platform delivers world-class supercomputers for science, combining native double-precision (FP64) performance, NVIDIA CUDA-X™ libraries and the full-stack capabilities of the NVIDIA AI platform. Bringing together NVIDIA's complete accelerated computing stack -- from hardware to software and optimized scientific libraries -- Vera Rubin accelerates AI, simulation and data-intensive research, transforming each system rack into a supercomputer for scientific discovery and industrial innovation. Built to unite high-precision simulation, AI and data analytics, the Vera Rubin platform is designed for the era of agents to advance scientific discovery by accelerating workloads such as climate modeling, computational fluid dynamics, quantum chemistry and energy exploration. With more than 7 exaflops of AI for science, 5 petaflops of native FP64 support and extreme memory bandwidth with up to 144 GPUs, a Vera Rubin supercomputing system can deliver performance on par with systems on the TOP500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers. This gives research centers and industrial enterprises the performance to run larger models, improve fidelity and shorten time to discovery. "Scientific discovery is now a race between the complexity of the world's greatest challenges and the computing systems built to solve them," said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. "NVIDIA Vera Rubin is a new instrument for science -- a rack-scale supercomputer that brings simulation, AI and data processing together to help researchers and industries design and discover faster than ever." Vera Rubin Advances Scientific Computing The NVIDIA Vera Rubin platform combines NVIDIA Rubin GPUs and NVIDIA Vera CPUs connected via high-speed NVIDIA NVLink™-C2C, NVIDIA ConnectX-9 SuperNICs and NVIDIA BlueField-4 DPUs in a direct liquid-cooled architecture. For scientific computing, Vera Rubin provides native FP64 capabilities to accelerate simulations that need the highest accuracy as well as the AI performance needed for surrogate models, scientific foundation models and AI-assisted analysis. Researchers can use a single platform to run traditional numerical solvers, train and deploy AI models, stream data from instruments and couple simulation with real-time analytics. Building Next-Generation Supercomputers Leading supercomputing centers and industrial innovators are adopting Vera Rubin to build a new generation of AI and high-performance computing (HPC) systems. At Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ), Blue Lion will be powered by the NVIDIA Vera Rubin platform and second-generation exascale-class HPE Cray supercomputing, delivering approximately 30x the computing power of LRZ's current system. Scheduled to come online in 2027, Blue Lion will support researchers across astrophysics, environmental and life sciences by enabling classic simulation and modeling, machine learning approaches and the use of surrogate models all in one. At the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, Doudna -- the next flagship U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) supercomputer at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory -- will be a Dell Technologies system powered by NVIDIA Vera Rubin and connected to DOE scientific instruments through the Energy Sciences Network. Doudna is being built for large-scale HPC workloads, AI training and inference, and data-intensive workflows across molecular dynamics, high-energy physics, fusion energy, materials science, drug discovery and astronomy. Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) has selected NVIDIA Vera Rubin, Vera CPU and NVIDIA Quantum-X800 InfiniBand for its next-generation Mission, Vision and Veritas systems, to be built and delivered by HPE using the latest HPE Cray supercomputing system. Mission is designed for national security workloads, while Vision with the Vera CPU will advance open science research, including foundation models, agentic AI and complex simulations spanning materials science, nuclear energy, fusion energy and quantum computing. Announced at ISC, the new Veritas system, with NVIDIA Rubin GPUs and standalone Vera CPU partitions, is designed for agents to advance scientific discovery at LANL. The accelerated computing systems will be built using the NVIDIA GPUs in a single unified system. For modern supercomputing applications, NVL4 optimizes density, energy efficiency and operational simplicity. Global system manufacturers including Bull, Dell Technologies, GIGABYTE, HPE and Supermicro are bringing NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL4 to market through direct liquid-cooled AI and HPC racks. The supercomputing racks, built with Vera Rubin NVL4, are designed to help research institutions, national labs and enterprises deploy rack-scale accelerated computing. The systems expand the NVIDIA accelerated computing ecosystem for scientific discovery, giving organizations a common platform for simulation, AI, data processing and visualization -- from individual rack deployments to large-scale supercomputing centers. Availability NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL4-based systems are expected to be available from global system manufacturers in Q4 this year.