Intel delivers Aurora supercomputer with 2 exaflops of computing power after postponement
Intel has finished delivering the Aurora supercomputer. Together with HPE, the company has delivered more than 10,000 ‘blades’ with a total of 63,744 GPUs and 21,248 CPUs. The supercomputer was actually supposed to be completed in 2018, but has been redesigned and postponed several times.
The Aurora supercomputer consists of 166 server racks with 64 blades each, Intel writes in a press release. The system is now equipped with a total of 10,624 blades, each with 2 Sapphire Rapids CPUs of 40 cores and 6 Ponte Vecchio GPUs. Intel says the entire supercomputer was delivered and installed at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory. The supercomputer also has 10.9 petabytes of DDR5 memory and 1.36 PB of HBM memory on the Sapphire Rapids CPUs. The system also has 1024 storage nodes with a total of 230PB of storage capacity and a total bandwidth of 31TB/s.
The supercomputer will be used, among other things, for scientific research. According to Intel, Aurora will actually go into use later this year. The company also previously shared details about an ‘Aurora GPT’ language model that will be focused on science and run on the supercomputer.
Intel expects Aurora to be the first supercomputer to achieve theoretical performance of 2 exaflops later this year when it is added to the TOP500 list. This would probably put the supercomputer in number one. Currently, the Frontier supercomputer with AMD hardware is in first place, with a performance of more than 1 exaflops.
The Aurora supercomputer was announced in 2015. The system then had an expected computing power of 180 petaflops. The system was later postponed until 2021. Intel did raise its performance expectations to 1 exaflops. In late 2021, Intel said the supercomputer would be delivered in 2022 and offer 2 exaflops of computing power. Ultimately, the system will come online this year, in 2023.
The installation of the Aurora supercomputer. Source: Argonne National Laboratory