UKRI Awards ARCHER2 Supercomputer Services Contract

UKRI has awarded contracts to run elements of the next national supercomputer, ARCHER2, which will represent a significant step forward in capability for the UK’s science community. ARCHER2 is provided by UKRI, EPCC, Cray (an HPE company) and the University of Edinburgh. “ARCHER2 will be a Cray Shasta system with an estimated peak performance of 28 PFLOP/s. The machine will have 5,848 compute nodes, each with dual AMD EPYC Zen2 (Rome) 64 core CPUs at 2.2GHz, giving 748,544 cores in total and 1.57 PBytes of total system memory.”

ARCHER2 to be first Cray Shasta System in Europe

“The new ARCHER2 supercomputer will be the first Shasta system announced in EMEA and the second system worldwide used for academic research. ARCHER2 will be the UK’s most powerful supercomputer and will be equipped with the revolutionary Slingshot interconnect, Cray ClusterStor high-performance storage, the Cray Shasta Software platform, and 2nd Gen AMD EPYC processors.”

AMD to Power Cray’s ARCHER2 Supercomputer in the UK

Following a procurement exercise, UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) are pleased to announce that Cray, an HPE company, has been awarded the contract to supply the hardware for the next national supercomputer, ARCHER2. Powered by AMD EPYC processors, ARCHER2 will be deployed at the University of Edinburgh. “Needless to say, ARCHER2 represents a significant step forwards in capability for the UK science community, with the system expected to sit among the fastest fully general purpose (CPU only) systems when it comes into service in May 2020.”