Aurora is a planned supercomputer to be completed in 2023. It will be the United States' second exascale computer after the

AMD Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American multinational semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, California, that develops computer processors and related technologies for business and consumer markets. While it initially manufact ...

-powered

Frontier A frontier is the political and geographical area near or beyond a boundary. A frontier can also be referred to as a "front". The term came from French in the 15th century, with the meaning "borderland"—the region of a country that fronts ...

-supercomputer. It is sponsored by the

United States Department of Energy The United States Department of Energy (DOE) is an executive department of the U.S. federal government that oversees U.S. national energy policy and manages the research and development of nuclear power and nuclear weapons in the United Stat ...

(DOE) and designed by

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the devel ...

and

Cray Cray Inc., a subsidiary of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, is an American supercomputer manufacturer headquartered in Seattle, Washington. It also manufactures systems for data storage and analytics. Several Cray supercomputer systems are listed i ...

for the

Argonne National Laboratory Argonne National Laboratory is a science and engineering research national laboratory operated by UChicago Argonne LLC for the United States Department of Energy. The facility is located in Lemont, Illinois, outside of Chicago, and is the lar ...

. It will have 2 exa

FLOPS In computing, floating point operations per second (FLOPS, flops or flop/s) is a measure of computer performance, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations. For such cases, it is a more accurate mea ...

in computing power which is approximately a quintillion (2⁶⁰ or 10¹⁸) calculations per second and will have an expected cost of US$500 million. It will follow

, which was the world's first exascale supercomputer in 2022.

History

In 2013 DOE presented their exascale vision of one exaFLOP at 20 MW by 2020. Aurora was first announced in 2015 and to be finished in 2018. It was expected to have a speed of 180 peta

which would be around the speed of

Summit A summit is a point on a surface that is higher in elevation than all points immediately adjacent to it. The topographic terms acme, apex, peak (mountain peak), and zenith are synonymous. The term (mountain top) is generally used only for a m ...

. Aurora was meant to be the most powerful supercomputer at the time of its launch and to be built by

with

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. In October 2020, DOE said that Aurora would be delayed again for a further 6 months and would no longer be the first exascale computer in the US. In late October 2021 Intel announced Aurora would now exceed 2 exaFLOPS in peak double-precision compute.

Planned usage

Planned functions include research on

nuclear fusion Nuclear fusion is a reaction in which two or more atomic nuclei are combined to form one or more different atomic nuclei and subatomic particles (neutrons or protons). The difference in mass between the reactants and products is manifest ...

, low carbon technologies, subatomic particles,

cancer Cancer is a group of diseases involving abnormal cell growth with the potential to invade or spread to other parts of the body. These contrast with benign tumors, which do not spread. Possible signs and symptoms include a lump, abnormal bl ...

and

cosmology Cosmology () is a branch of physics and metaphysics dealing with the nature of the universe. The term ''cosmology'' was first used in English in 1656 in Thomas Blount's ''Glossographia'', and in 1731 taken up in Latin by German philosophe ...

. It will also develop new materials that will be useful for batteries and more efficient

solar cells A solar cell, or photovoltaic cell, is an electronic device that converts the energy of light directly into electricity by the photovoltaic effect, which is a physical and chemical phenomenon.

. It is to be available to the general scientific community.

Architecture

Aurora will have over nine thousand nodes, with each node being composed of two

Intel Xeon Xeon ( ) is a brand of x86 microprocessors designed, manufactured, and marketed by Intel, targeted at the non-consumer workstation, server, and embedded system markets. It was introduced in June 1998. Xeon processors are based on the sa ...

Sapphire Rapids processors, six Xe

GPU A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed to manipulate and alter memory to accelerate the creation of images in a frame buffer intended for output to a display device. GPUs are used in embedded systems, mob ...

's and a unified memory architecture which will make a single node have a maximum computing power of 130 teraFLOPS. It will have around 10 petabytes of memory and 230 PB of storage. The machine is estimated to consume around 60 MW. For comparison, the fastest computer in the world today,

uses 21 MW while

uses 13 MW.

References

{{reflist Supercomputers Intel products Cray products United States Department of Energy Exascale computers

History

Planned usage

Architecture

See also

References