CHIPPEWA FALLS — A top official in the U.S. Department of Energy toured Hewlett Packard Enterprise in Chippewa Falls on Thursday, touting the advances in supercomputers that are manufactured in the city.
Paul Dabbar, DOE undersecretary, said four large computer systems are currently being manufactured at HPE. Once complete, they will head to facilities around the country, including Chicago and Berkeley, Calif.
“We’re the customer, but we’re a unique customer, because we are buying something that hasn’t been invented yet,” Dabbar said prior to the tour. “This is the center of supercomputing in the world. I like to see the people, see those who are the leaders of innovation in the world.”
The new machines are vastly faster than their predecessors.
“The opportunities are far more than what it’s already making,” Dabbar said. “It’s a stunning amount of computing capacity.”
Antonio Neri, HPE chief executive officer, said the new machines will be able to complete a billion billion transactions a second.
“What used to take weeks at times, now you do in seconds,” Neri explained. “This is a major advancement. Ultimately, it’s a tremendous amount of innovation that is being developed. It’s a marvel of engineering.”
The first of the four supercomputers should be complete by the end of this year, and the second one done by the end of 2021, Neri said.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s manufacturing building is located at 100 Cashman Drive. HPE purchased SGI for $275 million in 2016. In September 2019, HPE purchased Cray Inc. — which also had a facility in Chippewa Falls — for $1.4 billion.
Neri said HPE now has 800 employees in the city, combining the staffs of both SGI and Cray Inc., along with adding some workers.
“We have combined the two teams, and improved the infrastructure,” Neri said.
Pete Ungaro, head of HPE’s high performance computing unit, said that once completed, each of the four supercomputers they are building for the Department of Energy will take up the space of about two basketball courts, with nearly 200 cabinets – about the size of a refrigerator — of computing units. Ungaro said HPE now has about one-third of the worldwide supercomputing market.
“It’s a really important base to us,” Ungaro said. “We have a massive manufacturing capacity here in Chippewa Falls.”
While these large models are headed to government facilities, Ungaro said, private companies, from carmakers to airlines, will wind up purchasing smaller-sized supercomputers for their industries.
Because of security measures, the media was not allowed to accompany Dabbar on the tour of the facility.
The DOE and HPE are collaborating on a system to support the National Nuclear Security Administration, dubbed “Crossroads.” It is a joint effort between the Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories.
Dabbar, who is based in Washington, said the DOE budget is up 32% under President Donald Trump, as Congress has approved more funding for research and development on computers that assist in science, medicine and weather forecasting models.
“We have been under-investing in R&D in this country,” Dabbar contends.
The department is heavily involved with the private labs that are working on COVID-19 vaccines, Dabbar said. The supercomputers can examine proteins for drug manufacturers, using equipment that makes microscopic material visible.
“We are able to image it at an atomic level,” Dabbar said. “We can come up with recommendations.”
Dabbar added: “Coming up with a vaccine for COVID-19 would have taken several years. It looks like we’ll have one in 12 months.”
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