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Aurora (supercomputer)

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Aurora
Active
  • Deployment: Nov, 2023
OperatorsArgonne National Laboratory and U.S. Department of Energy
LocationArgonne Leadership Computing Facility
Power38.7 MW
Speed1.012 exaFLOPS (Rmax) / 1.98 exaFLOPS (Rpeak)[1]
CostUS$500 million (estimated cost)
PurposeScientific research and development
Websitehttps://www.anl.gov/aurora

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.

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

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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

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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

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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 uses 13 MW.

See also

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References

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  1. ^ "TOP500 May 2024". May 13, 2024. Retrieved May 13, 2024.
  2. ^ Zarley, B. David (March 18, 2019). "America's first exascale supercomputer to be built by 2021". The Verge. Archived from the original on June 5, 2021. Retrieved September 17, 2020.
  3. ^ "Intel and Cray are building a $500 million 'exascale' supercomputer for Argonne National Lab". Archived from the original on February 10, 2023. Retrieved September 26, 2020.
  4. ^ Intel Corporation, Architecting the Future of Supercomputing, August 23, 2023
  5. ^ "DOE Exascale Initiative" (PDF). Archived (PDF) from the original on March 30, 2021.
  6. ^ Burt, Jeff (April 10, 2015). "Intel, Cray Awarded $200 Million to Build Powerful Supercomputer". eWEEK. Retrieved September 17, 2020.
  7. ^ "The Argonne National Laboratory Supercomputer will Enable High Performance Computing and Artificial Intelligence at Exascale by 2021". Archived from the original on March 19, 2019.
  8. ^ Black, Doug (October 9, 2020). "DOE Under Secretary for Science Dabbar's Exascale Update: Frontier to Be First, Aurora to Be Monitored". insideHPC. Archived from the original on October 28, 2020. Retrieved November 6, 2020.
  9. ^ "Intel Innovation Spotlights New Products, Technology and Tools for..." Intel. Archived from the original on October 27, 2021. Retrieved October 27, 2021.
  10. ^ Intel Corporation, "Aurora Supercomputer Blade Installation Complete", October 27, 2021
  11. ^ "Top 500: Aurora Breaks into Exascale, but Can't Get to the Frontier of HPC". HPCwire. May 13, 2024. Retrieved May 13, 2024.
  12. ^ Shilov, Anton. "The Aurora Supercomputer Is Installed: 2 ExaFLOPS, Tens of Thousands of CPUs and GPUs". www.anandtech.com. Retrieved November 14, 2023.
  13. ^ "Aurora - HPE Cray EX - Intel Exascale Compute Blade, Xeon CPU Max 9470 52C 2.4GHz, Intel Data Center GPU Max, Slingshot-11 | TOP500". www.top500.org. Retrieved May 13, 2024.
  14. ^ "Using Exascale Supercomputers to Make Clean Fusion Energy Possible". September 2, 2022. Archived from the original on December 29, 2022. Retrieved February 10, 2023.
  15. ^ Johnson, Rob. "Aurora Supercomputer to Assist in the Fight Against Cancer". TECHNOLOGY NETWORKS. Archived from the original on June 5, 2021. Retrieved September 26, 2020.
  16. ^ a b "Energy Department to spend 200 million on new aurora supercomputer". NBC News. April 9, 2015. Archived from the original on June 5, 2021. Retrieved September 26, 2020.
  17. ^ "Aurora, Argonne supercomputer will be the most powerful in the U.S., will be installed at Argonne National Laboratory in the Chicago area". Archived from the original on November 25, 2020. Retrieved September 26, 2020.
  18. ^ Papka, Michael (December 8, 2020), IEEE Chicago and ACM Chicago webinar: Supercomputing and ALCF - Dec 7 2020, archived from the original on November 15, 2021, retrieved December 9, 2020
  19. ^ "Intel's 2021 Exascale Vision in Aurora". anandtech. Archived from the original on June 5, 2021. Retrieved November 24, 2020.
  20. ^ "How Argonne Is Preparing for Exascale in 2022". HPCwire. September 8, 2021. Archived from the original on June 5, 2022. Retrieved June 14, 2022.
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