What you can see, you can understand. Simulations help us understand the mysteries of black holes and see how a protein spike on the coronavirus causes COVID-19. They also let designers create everything from sleek cars to jet engines. But simulations are also among the most demanding computer applications on the planet because they require lots of the most advanced math. Simulations make numeric models visual with calculations that use a double-precision floating-point format called FP64. Each number in the format takes up 64 bits inside a computer, making it one the most computationally intensive of the many math formats today's GPUs support.

As the next big step in our efforts to accelerate high performance computing, the NVIDIA Ampere architecture defines third-generation Tensor Cores that accelerate FP64 math by 2.5x compared to last-generation GPUs. That means simulations that kept researchers and designers waiting overnight can be viewed in a few hours when run on the latest A100 GPUs.