It is primarily used for predictive applications in nuclear weapon stockpile stewardship, helping to assure the safety, reliability, and effectiveness of the United States' nuclear weapons.

Sierra is very similar in architecture to the Summit supercomputer built for the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Each node has 256GB of RAM, 44 IBM POWER9 cores spread across two physical sockets, and Four Nvidia Tesla V100 GPUs, each providing 16GB of VRAM.

This gives the complete system 8,948 CPUs, 17,896 GPUs, 1.14 PB of RAM, and 286 TB of VRAM.

[6] Sierra has consistently appeared on the Top500 list, peaking at second place in November 2018.