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Sandia Tests Spectra Supercomputer: Power-Efficient Performance Boost

2/28/2026

Summary

Story summary

Sandia National Laboratories is testing a new supercomputer architecture called Spectra, developed by NexSilicon.
Spectra uses reconfigurable accelerators to optimize operations without requiring software rewrites.
NexSilicon's accelerators claim to use half the power of NVIDIA's Blackwell while delivering significant performance advantages.
James Laros, program leader at Sandia National Laboratories, notes that many applications are limited by memory bandwidth.
The team is evaluating Spectra's performance for molecular dynamics simulations.

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Story summary

Sandia National Laboratories is testing a new supercomputer architecture called Spectra, developed by NexSilicon.
Spectra uses reconfigurable accelerators to optimize operations without requiring software rewrites.
NexSilicon's accelerators claim to use half the power of NVIDIA's Blackwell while delivering significant performance advantages.
James Laros, program leader at Sandia National Laboratories, notes that many applications are limited by memory bandwidth.
The team is evaluating Spectra's performance for molecular dynamics simulations.