For more than a year, the most productive supercomputer in the world has been the Frontier system based on AMD components. At the same time, it is the only supercomputer with a performance of over 1 exaflops. However, the leader should change soon. Argonne National Laboratory has reportedly already completed the installation of blade servers for the Aurora supercomputer.
After commissioning, Aurora should become the most powerful supercomputer, and at the same time the first with a performance of more than 2 exaflops.
At the same time, Aurora will also be interesting because it will rely on Intel components. Of course, it makes no sense to talk about direct competitors in this market, but in a sense Aurora will be an opponent of Frontier.
The configuration of the new supercomputer is already known. The system created by HPE contains 166 racks of 64 blade servers each, that is, a total of 10,624 blade servers. Each blade server is based on two Xeon Max (Sapphire Rapids) processors with 64 GB of built-in HBM2E memory, and also has six Intel Data Center Max (Ponte Vecchio) GPUs.
Which CPUs are used in Aurora are not specified yet, but it is logical to assume that these are the top 56-core Xeon Max 9480 in the line. That is, Aurora contains 21,248 56-core CPUs, whereas Frontier has 9472 64-core Epyc Epyc 7453s.
Of course, a considerable share of the performance of such systems, if not the lion's share, is enclosed in the GPU, but here it is much more difficult to compare them. Frontier has 37,888 Instinct MI250X accelerators, and Aurora has 63,744 Data Center Max accelerators. By the way, this is the first supercomputer on the new Intel CPU and GPU.
Despite the fact that the installation of the system has already been completed, there is still a test cycle ahead. The launch of Aurora is expected later this year.
