Intel and Cray team up to build exascale supercomputer in 2021

Monitoring Desk

WASHINGTON: Intel and Cray are teaming up to create an exascale super computer cluster for the US Department of Energy, which should be ready by 2021. The supercomputer has Intel written all over it, fitted with Intel Xeon CPUs, Optane memory and there it is, Xe GPUs.

The Supercomputer is to be named Aurora and involves a $500 million deal. The supercomputer cluster will be used for scientific research for the US Department of Energy. The Aurora supercomputer is based on Cray’s Shasta platform and will consist of more than two hundred computer racks.

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.

Intel will deliver the Aurora supercomputer, the United States’ first exascale system, to Argonne National Laboratory in 2021. Aurora will incorporate a future Intel Xeon Scalable processor, Intel Optane DC Persistent memory, Intel’s Xe compute architecture and Intel OneAPI programming framework — all anchored to Intel’s six key pillars of innovation.

The foundation of the Aurora supercomputer will be new Intel technologies designed specifically for the convergence of artificial intelligence and high-performance computing at extreme computing scale. These include a future generation of the Intel® Xeon® Scalable processor, Intel’s Xe compute architecture, a future generation of Intel® Optane™ DC Persistent Memory, and Intel’s One API software. Aurora will use Cray’s next-generation supercomputer system, code-named “Shasta,” which will comprise more than 200 cabinets and include Cray’s SlingshotTM high-performance scalable interconnect and the Shasta software stack optimized for Intel architecture.

“Cray is proud to be partnering with Intel and Argonne to accelerate the pace of discovery and innovation across a broad range of disciplines,” said Peter Ungaro, president and CEO of Cray. “We are excited that Shasta will be the foundation for the upcoming exascale-era characterized by extreme performance capability, new data-centric workloads and heterogeneous computing.”

Courtesy: (guru3d.com)