NOAA orders AMD-powered supercomputers with 327,680 Zen 2 cores, 1.3 petabytes of memory

[midian182]

What just happened? The United States’ National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has announced plans to refresh its supercomputers. The 10-year, $505.2 million program involves the purchase of two AMD-powered Cray systems that will have a combined performance of around 40 petaflops, which would place them in the top 25 most powerful supercomputers in the world.

The new systems will triple the weather forecasting agency’s operational supercomputing capacity. Each identical Cray Shasta machine features 2,560 dual-socket nodes—housed in 10 cabinets—powered by second-gen AMD Epyc Rome 64-core 7742 processors, connected by Cray’s Slingshot network. That equals 327,680 Zen 2 cores for the clusters.

Each computer has an incredible 1.3 petabytes of system memory, and Cray’s ClusterStor systems provide 26 petabytes of storage per site. It consists of 614 terabytes of flash storage, while two HDD file systems will store 12.5 petabytes—perfect for your Steam library.

The systems will be used for hurricane tracking, among other things

Each system has a peak theoretical performance of 12 petaflops. Combined with NOAA’s research and development machines, the total peak theoretical performance is 40 petaflops. Cray’s Shasta systems haven’t made the Top500 yet, but they’d be ranked around 25 on the latest list based on a ballpark 80 percent Linpack efficiency.

Set to be installed in 2022, the machines, located at Manassas, Virginia, and Phoenix, Arizona, will take turns acting as primary and backup systems. “We are committed to putting America back on top with the best weather forecasts, powered by the fastest supercomputers and world-class weather models,” said Neil Jacobs, PhD, acting NOAA administrator.

The new Crays will replace eight smaller machines, which include older IBM and Dell systems, along with a pair of Cray XC40s. General Dynamics Information Technology (GDIT) will take over from IBM in managing NOAA's operational centers in 2022. GDIT’s eight-year contract is worth $505.2 million and comes with a two-year optional renewal period.

Earlier this month, the US Navy ordered an AMD Epyc Rome/Nvidia Volta-powered supercomputer with 590TB of RAM.

Image credit: Gorodenkoff and Harvepino via Shutterstock

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https://www.techspot.com/news/84182-noaa-orders-amd-powered-supercomputers-327680-zen-2.html

 

[grumblguts]

Why would they do this if the drivers are so bad........
Maybe because they know what they are doing and wont be blaming AMD on user error.

 

[QuantumPhysics]

Which existing supercomputer predicted Antarctica would be 65 degrees 2 weeks ago?

 

[QuantumPhysics]

Why would they do this if the drivers are so bad........
Maybe because they know what they are doing and wont be blaming AMD on user error.

Or maybe because they aren't trying to run Crysis at 4K 60fps and then getting the stuffing beat out of them by an Intel+ Nvidia RTX build?

 

[trparky]

Why would they do this if the drivers are so bad........
Maybe because they know what they are doing and wont be blaming AMD on user error.

Easy. They're not using AMD's GPUs, only their CPUs which are absolutely kicking Intel's rear end. The only driver issues that AMD is having is with their GPUs, not their CPUs.

 

[Lionvibez]

I think the biggest part of the story is this.

"while two HDD file systems will store 12.5 petabytes"

Where can I get one drive that holds 6.25 petabytes or do they mean multiple drives in a "file System"?

 

[wiyosaya]

Or maybe because they aren't trying to run Crysis at 4K 60fps and then getting the stuffing beat out of them by an Intel+ Nvidia RTX build?

Getting the stuffing beat out of them by an Intel+ NVidia RTX build? ????
This is not a gaming machine, though, it may be your idea of the ultimate gaming machine.

Epyc has been crushing Xeon basically since it came out. Heck, even ThreadRipper crushes Xeon. And in compute/HPC - nVidia has not been anywhere near the performance of AMD GPUs for many, many years - not, of course, that this article even mentioned that there would be any GPUs in the system.

 

[trparky]

Epyc has been crushing Xeon basically since it came out. Heck, even ThreadRipper crushes Xeon. And in compute/HPC - nVidia has not been anywhere near the performance of AMD GPUs for many, many years - not, of course, that this article even mentioned that there would be any GPUs in the system.

Most definitely. When it comes to raw x86 compute power, AMD's Epyc and even their Threadripper chips are absolutely killing it. Anyone who is worth a damn and has two functioning brain cells will embrace AMD if they need massive amounts of x86 compute power.

 

[umbala]

Or maybe because they aren't trying to run Crysis at 4K 60fps and then getting the stuffing beat out of them by an Intel+ Nvidia RTX build?

Intel/nVidia fan boy hard at work I see, spreading ridiculous nonsense as usual.

 

[Evernessince]

Why would they do this if the drivers are so bad........
Maybe because they know what they are doing and wont be blaming AMD on user error.

Which existing supercomputer predicted Antarctica would be 65 degrees 2 weeks ago?

According to Hardware Unboxed's latest poll on YouTube (same people who write the reviews here), not nearly as many people are experiencing AMD GPU issues as techspot has previously alluded to. In fact of all respondents, only 6% reported major issues. 77% of people stated that they don't even own an AMD card. A stark contrast to the last one, of which an article was made.

If you remove the Nvidia users from the equation, that's 26.08% of AMD users having major problems. That's still very high but it's nearly HALF of what the last poll gave us of 48%. If there's anything you should take away from the stark difference between this poll and the prior one, it's that if you want to use a poll as data you need to do it in a way that will gather accurate data.

Don't mind me though, just raining on your "the world is on fire!" parade. It's not likely anyone could have predicted that polls give unreliable results /s.

 

[ddferrari]

Why would they do this if the drivers are so bad........
Maybe because they know what they are doing and wont be blaming AMD on user error.

These are CPU based, not GPU. Your drivers jab is full of user error. ;-)