Todd Jacobson
NS&D Monitor
4/10/2015
The Department of Energy made this week the third and final award under a supercomputer collaboration, awarding a $200 million contract for a supercomputer to be built at Argonne National Laboratory. The supercomputer, dubbed “Aurora,” will be built by Intel and Cray, and is expected to reach peak speeds of 180 PetaFLOP/s, five-to-seven times faster than current supercomputers. The new system is expected to help serve as a bridge in the development of exascale computing systems, and is expected to be delivered in 2018. An interim system named Theta will be completed in 2016. “The future of high performance computing will require significant innovations on multiple fronts and Argonne’s Aurora and Theta supercomputers represent successive generations of the transformation required in future HPC system architectures” Intel Vice President Raj Hazra said in a statement.
Last year, DOE announced $325 million in supercomputer awards at Livermore and Oak Ridge national laboratories that would be developed by IBM, NVIDIA, and Mellanox. Livermore’s new supercomputer will be called Sierra and is expected to be seven times more powerful than Livermore’s Sequoia supercomputer. Oak Ridge’s supercomputer will be named Summit and is estimated to be at least five times faster than the lab’s Titan supercomputer, which is the fastest supercomputer in the nation and the second fastest supercomputer in the world.
Aurora will focus on materials science, biological science, transportation efficiency, and renewable energy, DOE said. Intel will work with Cray as the system integrator that will provide scalable system expertise along with supercomputing technology and its high performance computing software stack. The supercomputer will be based on a Cray machine dubbed “Shasta” that is a follow-on to Cray’s XC series. DOE Under Secretary for Science Franklin Orr said Aurora will help the U.S. move one step closer to exascale computing. Exascale-level supercomputers would be about 1,000 times faster than today’s machines, which are capable of speeds in the petaflop/s range, which is about a quadrillion operations per second. “Argonne National Laboratory’s announcement of the Aurora supercomputer will advance low-carbon energy technologies and our fundamental understanding of the universe, while maintaining United States’ global leadership in high performance computing,” Orr said in a statement.