Intel will build America's first exascale supercomputer: the $500 million Aurora

[midian182]

Forward-looking: Intel has announced that it will build America's first exascale supercomputer—a system that can perform a quintillion calculations per second. Along with subcontractor Cray, the tech giant will develop the machine, expected to be ready by 2021, for the Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago.

The $500 million Aurora supercomputer will be powered by Intel’s future Xeon Scalable processor— Intel Xᵉ—alongside Optane DC memory, the X compute architecture, and Intel's ONE API suite of developer tools. Cray will be providing its Shasta system architecture, which can support multiple CPUs, GPUs, and high-performance interconnects such as Slingshot.

Secretary of Energy Rick Perry, who attended yesterday’s announcement ceremony, said, "Achieving exascale is imperative, not only to better the scientific community, but also to better the lives of everyday Americans."

"Aurora and the next generation of exascale supercomputers will apply [high-performance computing] and AI technologies to areas such as cancer research, climate modeling and veterans' health treatments."

Aurora will have a wide range of uses, from predicting how patients will respond to experimental drugs, to extreme-scale cosmological simulations, to helping develop more efficient organic solar cells and other materials.

In the world of supercomputers, the US is constantly competing with China. America currently has the world’s fastest machine—the 200 petaflop Summit—but it has fewer computers (108) than China (229) in the TOP500 rankings.

The US might not be the first country to build an exascale computer. China said it has already put into operation a prototype exascale machine, and it expects the final version to be ready by the second half of 2020 or the first half of 2021. Japan, meanwhile, hopes its Post-K exascale computer will be ready by next year.

“We don’t know what everybody else is doing, so we can only really talk to the plans in the United States,” said Rick Stevens, associate laboratory director for computing, environment, and life sciences at Argonne. “We know other countries are working on the path to exascale, but we don’t know precisely when they will deploy their systems.”

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https://www.techspot.com/news/79257-intel-build-america-first-exascale-supercomputer-500-million.html

 

[trparky]

But will it be able to run Crisis?

Oh, and will it have those oh so wonderful security exploits too?

 

[Danster1616]

This better be using #Quantumcomputing.

 

[toooooot]

I am curious if it could be the size shown in the picture

 

[toooooot]

But will it be able to run Crisis?

Oh, and will it have those oh so wonderful security exploits too?

If you remove those exploits, it could be 5 10% slower.
And for 500 millions, 10% slower is unacceptable.

 

[Vulcanproject]

I hope they have AMD on the phone for when they run out of processors to build it with

 

[netman]

"Secretary of Energy Rick Perry, who attended yesterday’s announcement ceremony, said, "Achieving exascale is imperative, not only to better the scientific community, but also to better the lives of everyday Americans.""

As usual the scientific community will use this supercomputer for one year, and then US military will take over! Go figure...

 

[JaredTheDragon]

This better be using #Quantumcomputing.

My guess is that they would use real computers instead.

 

[Babbel13]

I remember in the late 60's, I had a summer job with NASA at the Stennis test center and I saw two large CDC computers that were linked together. There were all these blinking lights behind plexiglass windows and it was about 35 feet long. Looked amazing even if a desktop might be more powerful now.

 

[Vulcanproject]

Looked amazing even if a desktop might be more powerful now.

If? A half decent smartphone from the last 5 years demolishes what was the fastest computer in the world from the mid 1980's.

Hell if you have a programmable digital thermostat then that has more processing power and memory than basically any 1960s supercomputer

 

[captaincranky]

@midian182 Said: "Aurora and the next generation of exascale supercomputers will apply [high-performance computing] and AI technologies to areas such as cancer research, >>climate modeling<< and veterans' health treatments."

You have to question the purpose of tasking a half billion dollar computer to "climate modeling", if nothing is going to be done about. The saying goes. "everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it". So now "Deep Thought" here, is going to think about the weather for a few months and say what, "our environment is going to hell in a hand basket"?

Oh well, at least it will likely be more accurate than the groundhog..

 

[wiyosaya]

@midian182 Said: "Aurora and the next generation of exascale supercomputers will apply [high-performance computing] and AI technologies to areas such as cancer research, >>climate modeling<< and veterans' health treatments."

You have to question the purpose of tasking a half billion dollar computer to "climate modeling", if nothing is going to be done about. The saying goes. "everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it". So now "Deep Thought" here, is going to think about the weather for a few months and say what, "our environment is going to hell in a hand basket"?

Oh well, at least it will likely be more accurate than the groundhog..

You have a point, there Captain. Heck, the very words "climate change" were scrubbed from US Govt web sites. https://www.businessinsider.com/tru...nge-references-scrubbed-from-websites-2018-1/

Not only that, but science is a most foul invective in the current administration. I am surprised the project is moving forward at all and that everyone working on the project has not heard "You're Fired!"

Then again, this administration is like a box of chocolates: You never know what you are going to get.
(Apologies to Forrest Gump!)

 

[pcnthuziast]

Very unimpressive tbh.

 

[Markoni35]

Funny how they assign those computers to "Department of Energy" when everyone knows it will be used by NSA and CIA. What's the point in lying if everyone knows the truth?