Argonne’s Aurora Supercomputer Breaks Exascale Barrier
May 13 2024 - 3:30PM
Business Wire
The Aurora supercomputer at the U.S. Department of Energy’s
(DOE) Argonne National Laboratory has officially surpassed the
exascale threshold, measuring over a quintillion calculations per
second on the new Top500 list. The results were announced today at
the ISC High Performance 2024 conference in Hamburg, Germany.
This press release features multimedia. View
the full release here:
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240513514675/en/
Aurora’s exascale computing power will
provide researchers with advanced capabilities for simulations, AI
and data analysis. (Image by Argonne National Laboratory.)
In its latest submission to the semi-annual list of the world’s
most powerful supercomputers, Aurora registered 1.012 exaflops
using 87% of the system’s 10,624 nodes. After making its Top500
debut in November 2023, the Argonne system retained its spot as the
second fastest supercomputer and joined DOE’s Oak Ridge National
Laboratory’s Frontier as the world’s second exascale machine.
Aurora also earned the top spot in a measure of artificial
intelligence (AI) performance, achieving 10.6 exaflops on the
HPL-MxP benchmark.
“We’re thrilled to see Aurora join the exascale club,” said
Michael Papka, director of the Argonne Leadership Computing
Facility (ALCF), a DOE Office of Science user facility at Argonne.
“I’m extremely proud of the Aurora team’s ongoing efforts to get
the system up and running for the research community. We can’t wait
to see what the full system will be capable of.”
As one of the world’s fastest supercomputers, Aurora gives
scientists a powerful new tool for carrying out research involving
simulation, AI and data analysis. The state-of-the-art system will
not only enable breakthroughs in science and engineering but also
spur new advances in technology and bolster the nation’s innovation
infrastructure.
“Aurora is fundamentally transforming how we do science for our
country,” Argonne Laboratory Director Paul Kearns said. “It will
accelerate scientific discovery by combining high performance
computing and AI to fight climate change, develop life-saving
medical treatments, create new materials, understand the universe
and so much more.”
“Aurora excels at tackling both traditional scientific computing
problems and AI-powered research,” added Rick Stevens, Argonne’s
associate lab director for Computing, Environment and Life
Sciences. “As AI continues to reshape the scientific landscape,
Aurora gives us a platform to develop new tools and approaches that
will significantly accelerate the pace of research.”
Built by Intel and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Aurora’s
first-of-its-kind architecture includes new technologies being
deployed at an unprecedented scale. The supercomputer’s 63,744
graphics processing units (GPUs) make it the world’s largest
GPU-powered system yet. It also has more endpoints in its
interconnect technology than any other system to date.
The Aurora installation team, which includes staff from Argonne,
Intel and HPE, continues to work through system validation,
verification and scale-up activities. Their work has included
addressing various hardware and software issues that emerge as the
massive system nears full-scale operations.
Teams participating in the ALCF’s Aurora Early Science Program
and DOE’s Exascale Computing Project have been preparing to run
their research projects on Aurora for the past several years. The
teams have demonstrated strong early performance gains while
scaling and optimizing codes for the system. The initial Aurora
projects include efforts to advance research in cosmology, fusion
energy science, drug discovery and the design of new materials for
clean energy technologies.
“Hitting exascale is a huge milestone but enabling
groundbreaking science is the ultimate goal,” said Susan Coghlan,
ALCF project director for Aurora. “The new performance numbers,
along with some promising runs from our early science teams, give
us a glimpse of what will be possible with Aurora.”
View source
version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240513514675/en/
Christopher J. Kramer Head of Media Relations Argonne National
Laboratory Office: 630.252.5580 Email: media@anl.gov