Intel has announced that the Aurora supercomputer at the Argonne National Laboratory is now complete and ready to be switched on. This powerful computer will be capable of delivering over two exaflops of computing power, equating to more than two billion billion calculations every second. This state-of-the-art machine is powered by thousands of chips and is housed in 166 racks, each of which accommodates 64 blades. In total, the Aurora occupies a footprint the size of two professional basketball courts at the ALCF data center.
Moreover, this supercomputer is fitted with 63,744 Intel Data Center GPU Max Series ‘Ponte Vecchio’ and 21,248 Intel Xeon CPU Max Series ‘Sapphire Rapids’ processors, a storage capacity of 220 petabytes and with a maximal total bandwidth of 31 terabytes per second.
While quantum computing’s popularity is on the rise, this supercomputer could pave the way to the future of computing. Susan Coghlan, ALCF project director for Aurora, remarked that We’re looking forward to putting Aurora through its paces to make sure everything works as intended before we turn the system over to the broader scientific community.
Moreover, Argonne National Laboratory associate laboratory director Rick Stevens remarked, While we work toward acceptance testing, we’re going to be using Aurora to train some large-scale open-source generative AI models for science. Aurora is projected to aid the scientific community in running models that aim to solve the world’s problems, particularly in combating climate change and other anthropogenic matters.
Overall, Intel and other collaborators hope that this supercomputer will help expedite more efficient and powerful supercomputing. Aurora is expected to be turned on by the end of this year and is anticipated to garner significant attention from the scientific community in the coming years.
