Intel’s newsroom reports: “Targeted for 2021 delivery, the Argonne National Laboratory Supercomputer will enable high-performance computing [HPC] and artificial intelligence [AI] at Exascale” The work is being done with sub-contractor Cray Inc.
This means 10^18 floating point operations per second, or exaFLOPS. Intel continues:
The Aurora system’s exaFLOP of performance – equal to a “quintillion” floating point computations per second – combined with an ability to handle both traditional high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI) will give researchers an unprecedented set of tools to address scientific problems at exascale. These breakthrough research projects range from developing extreme-scale cosmological simulations, discovering new approaches for drug response prediction and discovering materials for the creation of more efficient organic solar cells. The Aurora system will foster new scientific innovation and usher in new technological capabilities, furthering the United States’ scientific leadership position globally.
The Argonne National Laboratory is in Lemont, Illinois.
Check It Out: US DoE and Intel Building First Exascale Supercomputer
As someone who works (as a Senior System Administrator) at a University HPC site, a couple of comments:
1. gGrant … no, ARM is virtually non-existent in the HPC space. All the heavy lifting is done with Intel Xeon CPUs and, more and more, NVIDIA GPUs. Which leads to one of my complaints against Apple … their bull-headed insistence to not only not ship Macs with NVIDIA GPUs, but to also not allow NVIDIA to provide kernel drivers for macOS for external NVIDIA GPUs. This cripples the use of Macs in scientific computing. CUDA is the standard. I’ve heard that there is at least one Apple executive who is so miffed at NVIDIA over the whole debacle with NVIDIA GPUs in the 17″ MBP’s that they won’t allow it. To whoever that Apple executive is, I have two words: GROW UP. The scientific community helped save Apple’s bacon at the turn of the century when they enthusiastically embraced the Mac due to MacOS X being UNIX-based. Now you’re thanking that community by abandoning them.
2. The current #1 system on the Top 500 List (www.top500.org) (which doesn’t mean it’s the fastest supercomputer in the world … we all know that the NSA has a few things in their basement that they don’t release public benchmarks on) Summit, at ORNL, runs on IBM Power 9 processors and NVIDIA GPUs.
3. While Aurora will be the 1st exascale supercomputer in the United States, it likely won’t be the 1st one in the world. China is likely to beat us by a year.
Old UNIX Guy
I thought all the heavy lifting was done with server grade ARM these days. AWS and others are using ARM aren’t they? Must be an Intel PR stunt.
So that’s what they’re up to!
There’s a giant CRAY sign at the Mall of America, you can see it from the highway. I was driving past with a friend who used to work at Cray and he was just as surprised to see such a vigorous sign of life. I guess we just hadn’t been paying attention.
https://parsonscorp.com/project/cray-mall-america/
Good one! Perhaps to pay off the federal debt? 🙂
Psst…They’re actually going to use it to mine cryptocurrancy.