Intel will deliver the Aurora supercomputer, the United States’ first exascale system, to Argonne National Laboratory in 2021.
Today Intel announced plans to deliver the first exaflop supercomputer in the United States. The Aurora supercomputer will be used to dramatically advance scientific research and discovery. The contract is valued at more than $500 million and will be delivered to Argonne National Laboratory by Intel and sub-contractor Cray in 2021.
Achieving exascale is imperative, not only to better the scientific community, but also to better the lives of everyday Americans,” said U.S. Secretary of Energy Rick Perry. “Aurora and the next generation of exascale supercomputers will apply HPC and AI technologies to areas such as cancer research, climate modeling, and veterans’ health treatments. The innovative advancements that will be made with exascale will have an incredibly significant impact on our society.”
While there were no specific details released today about the Aurora architecture, Intel says the foundation of the Aurora supercomputer will be new technologies designed specifically for the convergence of artificial intelligence and high performance computing at extreme computing scale. These include:
- A future generation of Intel Xeon Scalable processor, Intel’s Xe compute architecture,
- A future generation of Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory
- Intel’s One API software.
- Cray’s next-generation supercomputer system, code-named “Shasta”, which will be comprised with more than 200 cabinets and include Cray’s Slingshot high performance scalable interconnect and the Shasta software stack optimized for Intel architecture.
Cray is proud to be partnering with Intel and Argonne to accelerate the pace of discovery and innovation across a broad range of disciplines,” said Peter Ungaro, president and CEO of Cray. “We are excited that Shasta will be the foundation for the upcoming exascale-era characterized by extreme performance capability, new data-centric workloads, and heterogeneous computing.”
Energy Secretary Rick Perry announces the Aurora Supercomputer
The Aurora systems’ exaFLOP of performance – equal to a “quintillion” floating point computations per second – combined with an ability to handle both traditional HPC and AI will give researchers an unprecedented set of tools to address scientific problems at exascale. These breakthrough research projects range from developing extreme-scale cosmological simulations, discovering new approaches for drug response prediction, and discovering materials for the creation of more efficient organic solar cells. The Aurora system will foster new scientific innovation and usher in new technological capabilities, furthering the United States’ scientific leadership position globally.
Today is an important day not only for the team of technologists and scientists who have come together to build our first exascale computer – but also for all of us who are committed to American innovation and manufacturing,” said Bob Swan, Intel CEO. “The convergence of AI and high-performance computing is an enormous opportunity to address some of the world’s biggest challenges and an important catalyst for economic opportunity.”
