Aurora (supercomputer)
US DOE supercomputer by Intel and Cray From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Aurora is an exascale supercomputer that was sponsored by the United States Department of Energy (DOE) and designed by Intel and Cray for the Argonne National Laboratory.[2] It was briefly the second fastest supercomputer in the world from November 2023 to June 2024.
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| Operators | Argonne National Laboratory and U.S. Department of Energy |
| Location | Argonne Leadership Computing Facility |
| Power | 38.7 MW |
| Speed | 1.012 exaFLOPS (Rmax) / 1.98 exaFLOPS (Rpeak)[1] |
| Cost | US$500 million (estimated cost) |
| Purpose | Scientific research and development |
| Website | https://www.anl.gov/aurora |
The cost was estimated in 2019 to be US$500 million.[3] Olivier Franza is the chief architect and principal investigator of this design.[4]
History
Summarize
Perspective
In 2013 DOE presented a proposal for an "exascale" supercomputer, capable of speeds in the neighborhood of 1 exaFLOP (1018 floating point mathematical operations per second) with a maximum power consumption of 20 megawatts (MW) by 2020.[5] Aurora was first announced in 2015 and to be finished in 2018. It was expected to have a speed of 180 petaFLOPS[6] which would be around the speed of Summit. Aurora was meant to be the most powerful supercomputer at the time of its launch and to be built by Cray with Intel processors. Later, in 2017, Intel announced that Aurora would be delayed to 2021 but scaled up to 1 exaFLOP. In March 2019, DOE said that it would build the first supercomputer with a performance of one exaFLOP in the United States in 2021.[7]
In October 2020, DOE said that Aurora would be delayed again for a further six months, and would no longer be the first exascale computer in the US.[8] In late October 2021 Intel announced that Aurora would now exceed 2 exaFLOPS in peak double-precision compute[9] – That claim however never was realized. The system was fully installed on June 22, 2023.[10]
In May 2024, Aurora appeared at number two on the Top500 supercomputer list, with a performance of 1.012 exaFLOPS, marking the second entry of an exascale capable system on the Top500.[11][12][13]
Usage
Functions include research on brain structure, nuclear fusion,[14] low carbon technologies, subatomic particles, cancer and cosmology.[15][16] It will also develop new materials that will be useful for batteries and more efficient solar cells.[16] It is to be available to the general scientific community.[17]
Architecture
Aurora has over nine thousand nodes, with each node being composed of two Intel Xeon Max[18] processors, six Intel Max series GPUs and a unified memory architecture, providing a maximum computing power of 130 teraFLOPS per node.[19] It has around 10 petabytes of memory and 230 petabytes of storage.
The machine is estimated to consume around 60 MW of power.[20] For comparison, the fastest computer in the world today, Frontier uses 21 MW while Summit used 13 MW.
See also
External links
References
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