Aurora's 10,624 Blades In Place As Exascale System Nears Completion
Gartner, Thursday, June 22, 2023
Aurora, one of the first three U.S. exascale supercomputers, has not had a straightforward path to installation and operation. The system has been repeatedly reconceptualized and rescheduled over the years, with delivery slipping from 2021 to 2022, then from 2022 to 2023.
Now, at long last, there seems to be a light at the end of the tunnel: Intel has announced that all of Aurora's 10,624 compute blades have been installed at Argonne National Laboratory.
The HPE-built Aurora supercomputer will deliver over two peak exaflops of computing power, an increase over its target when it was slated for an earlier delivery date. (For comparison, the already-operational Frontier system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory currently has a peak rating around 1.68 exaflops.) Powering the exascale supercomputer: 10,624 nodes, each equipped with sextuple Intel Xeon Max series GPUs (nee Ponte Vecchio) and dual Intel Xeon Max series CPUs (nee Sapphire Rapids with HBM).