Los Alamos National Laboratory is acquiring three new supercomputers—Mission, Vision, and Veritas—built with HPE and NVI

Los Alamos National Laboratory has announced plans to build three new supercomputers in collaboration with HPE and NVIDIA. The systems will use the HPE Cray Supercomputing GX5000 architecture paired with NVIDIA Vera Rubin platforms, combining NVIDIA Vera CPUs, NVIDIA Rubin GPUs and NVIDIA Quantum-X800 InfiniBand networking.

Mission will include NVIDIA Vera Rubin GPU nodes alongside 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. Both Veritas and the other systems will arrive together and serve the Laboratory Directed Research and Development program to help accelerate agentic AI for science.

The laboratory is pioneering new approaches to scientific computing with AI agents that can form hypotheses, choose tools, launch simulations, analyze outputs and refine subsequent steps. LANL's publicly documented work on URSA, the Universal Research and Scientific Agent, demonstrates this direction. URSA runs on existing systems and will run on Mission and Vision—it is a modular, feedback-driven AI framework designed to help scientists brainstorm hypotheses, plan experiments, run simulations and analyze results.

In testing, LANL demonstrated that the Vera CPU delivered seven times higher performance on URSA workloads than the CPUs in the Crossroads x86 supercomputer. On Branson, an open source Monte Carlo heat transfer simulation tool, Vera outperformed Crossroads CPUs by more than three times. These results stem from Vera's custom Olympus core, LPDDR5 memory and fast on-chip fabric.

A single Vera CPU outperforms a single socket x86-based CPU by more than three times while providing more than four times the memory per core and six times the memory per node. Mission is expected to be operational in 2027 and will be the fifth Advanced Technology System in the National Nuclear Security Administration's Advanced Simulation and Computing program, replacing Crossroads for classified national security workloads. Vision, also expected in 2027, will serve fundamental science including materials and nuclear science, energy modeling, biomedical research and AI.

The collaboration extends more than a decade of work between LANL and NVIDIA on CPUs, from Grace to Vera, using extreme codesign for LANL simulation workloads. These new systems 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.