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.”

Video: The Cray Shasta Architecture for the Exascale Era

Steve Scott from HPE gave this talk at the Rice Oil & Gas Conference. “With the announcement of multiple exascale systems, we’re now entering the Exascale Era, marked by several important trends. This talk provides an overview of the Cray Shasta system architecture, which was motivated by these trends, and designed for this new heterogeneous, data-driven world.”

AMD to Power 2 Exaflop El Capitan Supercomputer from HPE

Today HPE announced that it will deliver the world’s fastest exascale-class supercomputer for NNSA at a record-breaking speed of 2 exaflops – 10X faster than today’s most powerful supercomputer. ‘El Capitan is expected to be delivered in early 2023 and will be managed and hosted by LLNL for use by the three NNSA national laboratories: LLNL, Sandia, and Los Alamos. The system will enable advanced simulation and modeling to support the U.S. nuclear stockpile and ensure its reliability and security.”

AMD to Power Cray Shasta Supercomputer at Navy DSRC

The Department of Defense High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP) is upgrading its supercomputing capabilities with a new Cray Shasta system powered by AMD EPYC processors. The system, the HPCMP’s first with more than 10 PetaFLOPS of peak computational performance, will be installed at the Navy’s DSRC’s facility at Stennis Space Center, Mississippi and will serve users from all of the services and agencies of the Department.

Time-lapse Video of Big Red 200 Cray Supercomputer at Indiana University

In this video, technicians install the Big Red 200 supercomputer at Indiana University. IU is the first university to deploy a Cray Shasta system, the Cray Slingshot interconnect and Cray Urika AI Suite for Shasta, providing its engineers, researchers and scientists powerful resources for the next era of computing. The new supercomputer will be instrumental in the University’s exploration and advancement of AI in education, cybersecurity, medicine, environmental science and more.

AMD Delivers Best-in-Class HPC Performance at SC19

Today at SC19, AMD announced a set of new customer wins and new platforms supporting AMD EPYC processors and Radeon Instinct accelerators, as well as the release of ROCm 3.0 development environment. “HPC organizations are continuing to adopt the 2nd Gen AMD EPYC processor and Radeon Instinct accelerators for more powerful and efficient supercomputing systems. The 2nd Gen EPYC processors provide twice the manufacturing application performance and up to 60% faster Life Sciences simulations than competing solutions, while the Radeon Instinct GPU accelerator provides up to 6.6 peak theoretical TFLOPS Double Precision performance for HPC workloads.”

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.”

NERSC Unveils Mural for pending Perlmutter Supercomputer

NERSC has unveiled the mural that will grace the cabinets of the Perlmutter supercomputer that will be installed at Berkeley Lab in 2020. “The mural pays tribute to the system’s namesake, Nobel Laureate Saul Perlmutter. The Berkeley Lab physicist led the team whose work at NERSC contributed to the Nobel prize-winning insight that the universe’s expansion is speeding up. The resulting efforts to explain this acceleration led to today’s model of a universe dominated by dark energy and dark matter.”

HPE Completes Acquisition of Cray

Today HPE today announced it has completed the acquisition of supercomputing leader Cray Inc., earlier than the original target date. “Cray and HPE have a shared vision for the new exascale era, and by joining forces, we’re offering the promise of Cray’s technology to an expanded market with the opportunity to leverage HPE’s breadth, scale and innovation to bring supercomputing to the enterprise.”

Video: The Cray Shasta Architecture

In this video from the HPC User Forum at Argonne, Steve Scott from Cray presents: The Cray Shasta Architecture. The DOE has selected the Shasta architecture to power all three of their planned Exascale systems coming to Argonne, ORNL, and LLNL. “Shasta allows for multiple processor and accelerator architectures and a choice of system interconnect technologies, including our new Cray-designed and developed interconnect we call Slingshot.”