Intel chips to power Argonne’s Aurora supercomputer

April 9, 2015

The U.S. government is looking to boost the country’s exascale supercomputing prowess. Today, U.S. Department of Energy Under Secretary for Science and Energy Lynn Orr announced two new High Performance Computing (HPC) awards.

First, under the joint Collaboration of the Oak Ridge, Argonne, and Lawrence Livermore (CORAL) initiative, the DoE announced a $200 million investment to deliver a supercomputer known as Aurora to the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF). When commissioned in 2018, the supercomputer will draw America’s top researchers to Argonne National Laboratory, the DOE said.

And second, Orr announced $10 million for a high-performance computing R&D program, DesignForward, led by DoE’s Office of Science and National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). DesignForward is intended to accelerate the development of next-generation supercomputers. The $10 million in contracts to AMD, Cray, IBM, and Intel Federal complements the $25.4 million already invested in the first round of DesignForward.

Commenting on Aurora, Orr said in a prepared statement, “Argonne National Laboratory’s announcement of the Aurora supercomputer will advance low-carbon energy technologies and our fundamental understanding of the universe, while maintaining United States’ global leadership in high performance computing. This machine…will put the United States one step closer to exascale computing.”

The $200 million award is the third, and final, supercomputer investment funded as part of the CORAL initiative, a $525 million project announced by Department of Energy Secretary Moniz in November 2014. DOE earlier announced a $325 million investment to build state-of-the-art supercomputers at its Oak Ridge and Lawrence Livermore laboratories.

“Few national investments have the potential to demonstrate dramatic progress and capability across many scientific disciplines and domains with real-world benefits,” said Peter Littlewood, director, Argonne National Laboratory, in a statement. “Advanced computing is a lever that drives transformational change in science and technology, accelerating discovery and shortening the time for technology to reach market.”

The DoE cited several key research goals for Aurora:

  • Materials science: Designing new classes of materials that will lead to more powerful, efficient, and durable batteries and solar panels.
  • Biological science: Gaining the ability to understand the capabilities and vulnerabilities of organisms that can result in improved biofuels and more effective disease control.
  • Transportation efficiency: Collaborating with industry to improve transportation systems with enhanced aerodynamics features, as well as enable production of better, more highly-efficient and quieter engines.
  • Renewable energy: Engineering wind turbine design and placement to greatly improve efficiency and reduce noise.

The supercomputer will use Intel’s HPC scalable system framework to provide 180-PFLOPS peak performance. Cray Inc. will act as the system integrator. An interim computer called Theta will be delivered in 2016 to assist in the transfer of applications to the new technology.

“Cray is honored to partner with Argonne and Intel as we develop our next-generation Shasta system to build one of the fastest supercomputers on the planet for the Department of Energy,” said Peter Ungaro, president and CEO of Cray, in a statement. “Shasta will be a powerful combination of Intel’s new technologies and Cray’s advanced supercomputing expertise, creating a single, flexible system that will enable huge advances in computing and analytics. Aurora will be the first system in our Shasta family and we couldn’t be more excited.”

The Wall Street Journal quotes Cray executive Barry Bolding as saying Aurora should be a contender to set speed records in 2018. The Journal further reports that Intel Xeon Phi chips will power Aurora and be complemented with a new communications technology for interconnecting the chips.

About the Author

Rick Nelson | Contributing Editor

Rick is currently Contributing Technical Editor. He was Executive Editor for EE in 2011-2018. Previously he served on several publications, including EDN and Vision Systems Design, and has received awards for signed editorials from the American Society of Business Publication Editors. He began as a design engineer at General Electric and Litton Industries and earned a BSEE degree from Penn State.

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