Atipa to Build 3.4 Petaflop Super for DOE Environmental Molecular Sciences Lab

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The Department of Energy’s Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory has ordered up a 3.4-petaflop supercomputer from Atipa Technologies, the HPC division of Microtech Computers. The new system will replace the Chinook supercomputer which aids energy, environment and basic science missions important to DOE.

The 42-rack machine will boast a total of 195,840 cores, consisting of 23,000 conventional Intel Xeon processors tied to 184,000 gigabytes of memory. The 1,440 compute nodes will also have an undisclosed number of Xeon Phi coprocessing cards alongside the Xeons, allowing the system to parallelize up to 120 extra calculations. A shared parallel filesystem will offer 2.7 petabytes of usable storage, across an FDR Inifiniband network. In total, there will be 128 GB of memory per node. What sets the new supercomputer apart, Atipa said, is the amount of memory devoted to each CPU, allowing the models that scientists run to operate more efficiently. For comparison, the recently completed “Stampede” supercomputer at the University of Texas also relies on just over 184,000 gigabytes of memory, including 204,900 cores split between a number of 8-core Intel Xeon E5-2680 microprocessors.

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