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Operators | Argonne National Laboratory and U.S. Department of Energy |
Location | Argonne Leadership Computing Facility |
Power | 38.7 MW |
Speed | 1.012 exaFLOPS (Rmax) / 1.98 exaFLOPS (Rpeak) [1] |
Cost | US$500 million (estimated cost) |
Purpose | Scientific research and development |
Website | https://www.anl.gov/aurora |
Aurora is an Exascale supercomputer that was sponsored by the United States Department of Energy (DOE) and designed by Intel and Cray for the Argonne National Laboratory. [2] It has been the second fastest supercomputer in the world since 2023. It is expected that after optimizing its performance it will exceed 2 ExaFLOPS, making it the fastest computer ever.
The cost was estimated in 2019 to be US$500 million. [3] Olivier Franza is the chief architect and principal investigator of this design. [4]
In 2013 DOE presented their exascale vision of one exaFLOP at 20 MW by 2020. [5] Aurora was first announced in 2015 and to be finished in 2018. It was expected to have a speed of 180 petaFLOPS [6] which would be around the speed of Summit. Aurora was meant to be the most powerful supercomputer at the time of its launch and to be built by Cray with Intel processors. Later, in 2017, Intel announced that Aurora would be delayed to 2021 but scaled up to 1 exaFLOP. In March 2019, DOE said that it would build the first supercomputer with a performance of one exaFLOP in the United States in 2021. [7]
In October 2020, DOE said that Aurora would be delayed again for a further six months, and would no longer be the first exascale computer in the US. [8] In late October 2021 Intel announced that Aurora would now exceed 2 exaFLOPS in peak double-precision compute. [9] The system was fully installed on June 22, 2023. [10]
In May 2024, Aurora appeared at number two on the Top500 supercomputer list, with a performance of 1.012 exaFLOPS, marking a second entry of an Exascale capable system on the Top500. [11] [12] [13] Aurora is still expected to exceed 2 exaFLOPS of performance once the entire system has been brought online and optimizations have been made, exceeding Frontier as the #1 supercomputer on Top500, as optimizing supercomputers can lead to significant performance improvements. [12]
Functions include research on nuclear fusion, [14] low carbon technologies, subatomic particles, cancer and cosmology. [15] [16] It will also develop new materials that will be useful for batteries and more efficient solar cells. [16] It is to be available to the general scientific community. [17]
Aurora has over nine thousand nodes, with each node being composed of two Intel Xeon Max [18] processors, six Intel Max series GPUs and a unified memory architecture, providing a maximum computing power of 130 teraFLOPS per node. [19] It has around 10 petabytes of memory and 230 petabytes of storage.
The machine is estimated to consume around 60 MW of power. [20] For comparison, the fastest computer in the world today, Frontier uses 21 MW while Summit uses 13 MW.
A supercomputer is a type of computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instructions per second (MIPS). Since 2017, supercomputers have existed which can perform over 1017 FLOPS (a hundred quadrillion FLOPS, 100 petaFLOPS or 100 PFLOPS). For comparison, a desktop computer has performance in the range of hundreds of gigaFLOPS (1011) to tens of teraFLOPS (1013). Since November 2017, all of the world's fastest 500 supercomputers run on Linux-based operating systems. Additional research is being conducted in the United States, the European Union, Taiwan, Japan, and China to build faster, more powerful and technologically superior exascale supercomputers.
Floating point operations per second is a measure of computer performance in computing, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations.
MareNostrum is the main supercomputer in the Barcelona Supercomputing Center. It is the most powerful supercomputer in Spain, one of thirteen supercomputers in the Spanish Supercomputing Network and one of the seven supercomputers of the European infrastructure PRACE.
The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), is a high-performance computing (supercomputer) National User Facility operated by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory for the United States Department of Energy Office of Science. As the mission computing center for the Office of Science, NERSC houses high performance computing and data systems used by 9,000 scientists at national laboratories and universities around the country. Research at NERSC is focused on fundamental and applied research in energy efficiency, storage, and generation; Earth systems science, and understanding of fundamental forces of nature and the universe. The largest research areas are in High Energy Physics, Materials Science, Chemical Sciences, Climate and Environmental Sciences, Nuclear Physics, and Fusion Energy research. NERSC's newest and largest supercomputer is Perlmutter, which debuted in 2021 ranked 5th on the TOP500 list of world's fastest supercomputers.
The Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), formerly the National Leadership Computing Facility, is a designated user facility operated by Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Department of Energy. It contains several supercomputers, the largest of which is an HPE OLCF-5 named Frontier, which was ranked 1st on the TOP500 list of world's fastest supercomputers as of June 2023. It is located in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful non-distributed computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year. The first of these updates always coincides with the International Supercomputing Conference in June, and the second is presented at the ACM/IEEE Supercomputing Conference in November. The project aims to provide a reliable basis for tracking and detecting trends in high-performance computing and bases rankings on HPL benchmarks, a portable implementation of the high-performance LINPACK benchmark written in Fortran for distributed-memory computers.
Petascale computing refers to computing systems capable of calculating at least 1015 floating point operations per second (1 petaFLOPS). Petascale computing allowed faster processing of traditional supercomputer applications. The first system to reach this milestone was the IBM Roadrunner in 2008. Petascale supercomputers were succeeded by exascale computers.
The National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) is a United States Department of Energy (DOE) Leadership Computing Facility that houses the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), a DOE Office of Science User Facility charged with helping researchers solve challenging scientific problems of global interest with a combination of leading high-performance computing (HPC) resources and international expertise in scientific computing.
Jaguar or OLCF-2 was a petascale supercomputer built by Cray at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The massively parallel Jaguar had a peak performance of just over 1,750 teraFLOPS. It had 224,256 x86-based AMD Opteron processor cores, and operated with a version of Linux called the Cray Linux Environment. Jaguar was a Cray XT5 system, a development from the Cray XT4 supercomputer.
Exascale computing refers to computing systems capable of calculating at least "1018 IEEE 754 Double Precision (64-bit) operations (multiplications and/or additions) per second (exaFLOPS)"; it is a measure of supercomputer performance.
This list compares various amounts of computing power in instructions per second organized by order of magnitude in FLOPS.
The history of supercomputing goes back to the 1960s when a series of computers at Control Data Corporation (CDC) were designed by Seymour Cray to use innovative designs and parallelism to achieve superior computational peak performance. The CDC 6600, released in 1964, is generally considered the first supercomputer. However, some earlier computers were considered supercomputers for their day such as the 1954 IBM NORC in the 1950s, and in the early 1960s, the UNIVAC LARC (1960), the IBM 7030 Stretch (1962), and the Manchester Atlas (1962), all of which were of comparable power.
Several centers for supercomputing exist across Europe, and distributed access to them is coordinated by European initiatives to facilitate high-performance computing. One such initiative, the HPC Europa project, fits within the Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications (DEISA), which was formed in 2002 as a consortium of eleven supercomputing centers from seven European countries. Operating within the CORDIS framework, HPC Europa aims to provide access to supercomputers across Europe.
Xeon Phi is a discontinued series of x86 manycore processors designed and made by Intel. It was intended for use in supercomputers, servers, and high-end workstations. Its architecture allowed use of standard programming languages and application programming interfaces (APIs) such as OpenMP.
The Cray XC40 is a massively parallel multiprocessor supercomputer manufactured by Cray. It consists of Intel Haswell Xeon processors, with optional Nvidia Tesla or Intel Xeon Phi accelerators, connected together by Cray's proprietary "Aries" interconnect, stored in air-cooled or liquid-cooled cabinets. The XC series supercomputers are available with the Cray DataWarp applications I/O accelerator technology.
Summit or OLCF-4 is a supercomputer developed by IBM for use at Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), a facility at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, capable of 200 petaFLOPS thus making it the 5th fastest supercomputer in the world after Frontier (OLCF-5), Fugaku, LUMI, and Leonardo, with Frontier being the fastest. It held the number 1 position from November 2018 to June 2020. Its current LINPACK benchmark is clocked at 148.6 petaFLOPS.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise Frontier, or OLCF-5, is the world's first exascale supercomputer. It is hosted at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) in Tennessee, United States and became operational in 2022. As of December 2023, Frontier is the world's fastest supercomputer. It is based on the Cray EX and is the successor to Summit (OLCF-4). Frontier achieved an Rmax of 1.102 exaFLOPS, which is 1.102 quintillion floating-point operations per second, using AMD CPUs and GPUs.
Fugaku(Japanese: 富岳) is a petascale supercomputer at the Riken Center for Computational Science in Kobe, Japan. It started development in 2014 as the successor to the K computer and made its debut in 2020. It is named after an alternative name for Mount Fuji.
LUMI is a petascale supercomputer located at the CSC data center in Kajaani, Finland. As of January 2023, the computer is the fastest supercomputer in Europe.
Zettascale computing refers to computing systems capable of calculating at least "1021 IEEE 754 Double Precision (64-bit) operations (multiplications and/or additions) per second (zettaFLOPS)". It is a measure of supercomputer performance, and as of July 2022 is a hypothetical performance barrier. A zettascale computer system could generate more single floating point data in one second than was stored by the total digital means on Earth in the first quarter of 2011.