Aurora, world’s second-fastest system, is an open science system housed at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF), a part of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science user facility.
In collaboration with Intel, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has delivered the world’s second exascale supercomputer, Aurora. Aurora has reached 1.012 exaflops on 87% of the system, making it the world’s second-fastest supercomputer as verified by the TOP500 list of the most powerful supercomputers. HPE has been leading the supercomputing1 and Aurora is not only the company’s second exascale system, but also the largest AI-capable system globally.
“We are proud of the strong partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy, Argonne National Laboratory, and Intel to realize a system of this scale and magnitude that was made possible through our joint innovative engineering, multiple teams, and most importantly, shared value of delivering state-of-the-art technology to fuel science and benefit humankind,” said Trish Damkroger, Senior Vice President and General Manager, HPC & AI Infrastructure Solutions, HPE.
“We are honored to celebrate another significant milestone in exascale with Aurora, which delivers massive compute capabilities to make breakthrough scientific discoveries and help solve the world’s toughest problems.”
Trish Damkroger, Senior Vice President and General Manager, HPC & AI Infrastructure Solutions, HPE
An exascale computing system can process one quintillion operations per second. Computational power at this scale makes it possible to address some of humanity’s most complex problems. Aurora is built with the HPE Cray EX supercomputer, which is purpose-built to support the magnitude and scale of exascale.
“Aurora is a first-of-its-kind supercomputer and we expect it to be a gamechanger for researchers. Reaching this milestone with a second exascale system in the U.S. is an incredibly significant achievement that will advance open science initiatives globally,” said Rick Stevens, Associate Laboratory Director and Distinguished Fellow, Argonne National Laboratory.
The Aurora exascale supercomputer is the result of a strong private-public partnership between HPE, Intel, the U.S. Department of Energy, and Argonne National Laboratory, which requires co-investment and co-development to create the breakthrough engineering that is necessary to advancing science. As part of the process of optimizing and stress-testing the system, researchers have already successfully run a diverse range of programming models, languages and applications on the system.
“The Aurora supercomputer was designed to support the research and science communities within the HPC and AI space. Our ongoing collaboration with Argonne National Laboratory and HPE has resulted in promising early science success stories. And we’re excited to see what’s to come as we continue to optimize system performance to accelerate the science and march toward what is next,” said Ogi Brkic, Vice President and General Manager, Data Center AI Solutions, Intel.
The system is also the largest deployment of open, Ethernet-based supercomputing interconnect – HPE Slingshot – on a single system. Aurora has achieved exascale on a partial run of the system, tapping 9,234 of the total nodes.