It remains to test
For more than a year now, the most productive supercomputer in the world has been the Frontier system based on AMD components. At the same time, this is the only supercomputer with a performance of more than 1 exaflops. However, soon the leader should change. Argonne National Laboratory has reportedly completed the installation of blade servers for the Aurora supercomputer.
When launched, the Aurora should become the most powerful supercomputer, and at the same time the first with a performance of more than 2 exaflops.
At the same time, Aurora will also be interesting because it will rely on Intel components. Of course, it makes no sense to talk about direct competitors in this market, but in a sense, Aurora will be an opponent of Frontier.
Intel is poised to leapfrog both AMD and Nvidia.
The configuration of the new supercomputer is already known. The HPE-built system contains 166 racks of 64 blades each, for a total of 10,624 blades. Each blade server is based on two Xeon Max (Sapphire Rapids) processors with 64GB HBM2E onboard memory and six Intel Data Center Max (Ponte Vecchio) GPUs.
What kind of CPUs are used in Aurora has not yet been specified, but it is logical to assume that these are the top 56-core Xeon Max 9480s in the line. That is, Aurora contains 21,248 56-core CPUs, while Frontier has 9472 64-core Epyc Epyc 7453s.
Of course, a significant share of the performance of such systems, if not the lion’s share, lies in the GPU, but here it is much more difficult to compare them. Frontier has 37,888 Instinct MI250X accelerators, while Aurora has 63,744 Data Center Max accelerators. By the way, this is the first supercomputer on the new Intel CPUs and GPUs.
Despite the fact that the installation of the system has already been completed, there is still a test cycle ahead. Aurora is expected to launch later this year.
