Argonne National Laboratory and Intel announced on Thursday that installation of 10,624 blades for the Aurora supercomputer has been completed and the system will come online later in 2023. The machine uses tens of thousands of Xeon Max 'Sapphire Rapids' processors with HBM2E memory as well as tens of thousands Data Center GPU Max 'Ponte Vecchio' compute GPUs to achieve performance of over 2 FP64 ExaFLOPS.
"Aurora is the first deployment of Intel's Max Series GPU, the biggest Xeon Max CPU-based system, and the largest GPU cluster in the world," said Jeff McVeigh, Intel's general manager of the Super Compute Group. When it comes online later this year, it promises to reach a theoretical peak performance beyond 2 ExaFLOPS, making it the first supercomputer to achieve this performance.
The DOE has been at the forefront of supercomputing for seventy years. Indeed, the United States Department of Energy has largely paved the way for the entire supercomputing industry.
There are hundreds of supercomputers in the world that help to drive scientific discoveries, but only one of these systems can be the fastest computer in the world. Competition between nations working to build the best supercomputer has driven technological development and led to the creation of ever faster computer hardware. In this article, we look at the fastest supercomputers in the world over time.
Supercomputers are becoming commonplace, thanks to faster microprocessors and more sophisticated clusters of servers. But do you have one in your office? Probably not. They are expensive and take up a huge amount of space. They are hot, noisy, temperamental, and surrounded by a gaggle of experts who approach computing in ways that are semantically different from business-oriented computer experts. That doesn't have to be the case.
