Argonne National Laboratory’s most powerful supercomputer is now complete and, along with its creators Intel, HPE and the Department of Energy, hope to bring it online by the end of the year.
according to laboratory“, “Aurora will theoretically be able to provide more than 2 exaflops of computing power, that is, more than 2 billion calculations per second. “
Thousands of chips are behind the stunning performance figures, although with quantum computing rapidly approaching, this could indeed be a one-of-a-kind supercomputer paving the way for the future.
Aurora Supercomputer
The supercomputer consists of no fewer than 10,624 70-pound rectangular blades, the last of which was successfully installed on June 22. Blades are installed in 166 racks, each rack holds 64 blades. Spread over eight rows, the Auroras occupy the space of two professional basketball courts in the ALCF data center, Argonne said.
Each blade is equipped with two Intel Xeon Max series CPUs, six Intel Max series GPUs, memory, networking and cooling technology.
Susan Coghlan, ALCF program director for Aurora, said: “We look forward to testing Aurora to make sure everything works as expected before handing over the system to the wider scientific community.”
Other important figures include 63,744 Intel data center GPU Max series “Ponte Vecchio” and 21,248 Intel Xeon CPU Max series “Sapphire Rapids” processors, and more than 1,024 storage nodes with a total capacity of 220 PB and a total bandwidth of up to s 31 TB.
All of this, Intel and its collaborators hope, will enable more efficient and powerful supercomputing when running models to help solve world problems, such as combating climate change and other man-made problems.
Meanwhile, Rick Stevens, deputy laboratory director at Argonne National Laboratory, said: “While we work hard on acceptance testing, we will use Aurora to train some large-scale open source generative artificial intelligence models for science.”
