Los Alamos National Laboratory is deploying three new supercomputers built with HPE and NVIDIA, featuring NVIDIA Vera CP
Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) is acquiring three new supercomputers—Mission, Vision and Veritas—built in collaboration with HPE and NVIDIA. The systems will feature the HPE Cray Supercomputing GX5000 architecture, combining NVIDIA Vera CPUs, NVIDIA Rubin GPUs and NVIDIA Quantum-X800 InfiniBand networking.
Under the planned configuration, Mission will incorporate NVIDIA Vera Rubin GPU nodes alongside 2,300 standalone NVIDIA Vera CPUs using the HPE Cray Supercomputing GX240 blade. Vision will feature approximately 1,150 standalone NVIDIA Vera CPUs to complement NVIDIA Vera Rubin nodes. Veritas will arrive alongside Mission and Vision to serve the Laboratory Directed Research and Development program, testing these technologies for use in larger systems at LANL.
The new systems will accelerate agentic AI for science, leveraging AI agents that can form hypotheses, choose tools, launch simulations, analyze outputs and refine next steps. LANL's ongoing work on URSA, the Universal Research and Scientific Agent, demonstrates this direction—a modular, feedback-driven AI framework designed to help scientists brainstorm hypotheses, plan experiments, run simulations and analyze results. The framework is currently running on Venado and will soon operate on Mission and Vision.
LANL's early testing demonstrates significant performance gains. The Vera CPU delivered 7x higher performance on URSA workloads than the CPUs in the Crossroads x86 supercomputer. In testing on Branson, an open source Monte Carlo heat transfer simulation tool, Vera outperforms Crossroads CPUs by over 3x. 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. These capabilities derive from Vera's custom Olympus core, LPDDR5 memory and fast on-chip fabric.
Mission is expected to be operational in 2027 and will become 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 three 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, continuing more than a decade of deep collaboration between LANL and NVIDIA on CPU development.