Intel Delivers First Exascale Supercomputer to Argonne National Laboratory

cageymaru

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Intel Corporation and Cray Inc. have announced that a Cray "Shasta" system will be the first U.S. exascale supercomputer. This $500 million Aurora supercomputer will be coming to the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory in 2021 and will have a performance of one exaFLOP - a quintillion floating point operations per second. In addition, this system is designed to enable the convergence of traditional HPC, data analytics, and artificial intelligence -- at exascale. The program contract is valued at more than $100 million for Cray, one of the largest contracts in the company's history. The design of the Aurora system calls for 200 Shasta cabinets, Cray's software stack optimized for Intel architectures, Cray Slingshot interconnect, as well as next generation Intel technology innovations in compute processor, memory and storage technologies. Intel's Rajeeb Hazra detailed some of the futuristic technology coming to Aurora including a future generation Intel Xeon Scalable processor, the recently announced Intel Xe compute architecture, and Intel Optane DC persistent memory.

"Today is an important day not only for the team of technologists and scientists who have come together to build our first exascale computer -- but also for all of us who are committed to American innovation and manufacturing," said Bob Swan, Intel CEO. "The convergence of AI and high-performance computing is an enormous opportunity to address some of the world's biggest challenges and an important catalyst for economic opportunity."

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.
 
It will be an exaFLOP when the system is completed in 2021. Kind of premature to say it's the first one at this point. Also, what happened to Perlmutter?
 
Terrific a $100,000,000 super computer with 100s of security flaws, great job DoE!
 
Terrific a $100,000,000 super computer with 100s of security flaws, great job DoE!

*500,000,000




How does this stack up against the Stanford Folding at Home super-computer? Obviously you can't compare them in their application, I'm just wondering what the flops are comparatively.
 
*500,000,000




How does this stack up against the Stanford Folding at Home super-computer? Obviously you can't compare them in their application, I'm just wondering what the flops are comparatively.
Peak distributed computing power was about 146 PFLOP/s last I checked. That would make the Aurora 6.85 times more powerful. But we don't know yet if the EFLOP/s number is going to be average or peak. If it's average I'll be very impressed.
 
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