At the ISC High Performance 2024 event, Intel unveiled the Aurora supercomputer developed in collaboration with Argonne National Laboratory and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). Let’s take a look at the details together.
Aurora becomes the world’s fastest supercomputer in artificial intelligence
The Aurora supercomputer is a major step forward in accelerating scientific discovery. By reaching 1,012 exaflops, Aurora will break the exascale barrier, enabling scientists to reach dimensions previously unattainable.
Since Aurora is designed as an AI-driven system, it will allow researchers to accelerate scientific discoveries using AI models covering a wide range of fields.
Argonne’s early AI-enabled research has made significant advances in mapping the complex structure of the human brain, advancing high-energy particle physics with deep learning, and accelerating drug design with AI.
The Aurora supercomputer is a large system with 166 racks and 10,624 compute blades. It is also equipped with 21,248 Intel Xeon CPU Max Series processors and 63,744 Intel Data Center GPU Max Series units, making it one of the largest GPU clusters in the world. It has the largest open Ethernet-based supercomputer communications network, equipped with 84,992 HPE Slingshots.
Aurora also performed well in benchmark tests such as high-performance LINPACK and high-performance conjugate gradient. But the most important point is that Aurora’s AI-driven structure enables scientists to perform complex calculations for real-world applications.
One of the key factors in Aurora’s success is the Intel Xe GPU architecture and the hardware designed specifically for it. This architecture is optimized to accelerate complex AI operations such as deep learning models. Intel’s software tools give developers flexibility and scalability so they can work across devices and form factors.
Aurora’s success also sheds light on Intel’s future technology developments. The mixed-precision AI benchmark results, which will be the basis for the company’s next-generation GPU, will play an important role in determining the direction of future technology development.
The Aurora supercomputer represents the beginning of a new era in AI and high-performance computing. What do you think? Please don’t forget to share your thoughts with us in the comments section below.
