Lugano – The Swiss National Supercomputing Centre, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and NVIDIA are developing a new supercomputer. It will have seven times more powerful artificial intelligence capabilities than the current leading system in the world.

The Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS), Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and the NVIDIA are creating a new supercomputer, as was announced in a press release. Planned to come online in 2023, the Alps system will replace CSCS’s existing Piz Daint supercomputer in Lugano.

What reportedly sets Alps apart is its powerful artificial intelligence capabilities. It will be able to train GPT-3, one of the world’s largest natural language processing model, in only two days. This is seven times faster than NVIDIA’s 2.8-AI exaflops Selene supercomputer, currently recognized as the world’s leading supercomputer in this area.

The new Swiss supercomputer will be open to the broad community of researchers in Switzerland and the rest of the world. It will enable research projects in fields as wide-ranging as materials sciences, life sciences, molecular dynamics and quantum chemistry.

“We are not simply procuring a new computer. For enabling scientific breakthroughs, we are retrofitting our computer center in several expansion phases to a service-oriented research infrastructure,” said Thomas Schulthess, computational physicist at ETH Zurich and director of CSCS.

The CSCS is a facility of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH) and is based in Lugano. Its goal is to enable world-class scientific research by pioneering and supporting supercomputing technologies.

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