Cray, AMD to build 1.5 exaflops supercomputer for US government

'AMD and Cray have announced that they're building "Frontier," a new
supercomputer for the Department of Energy at Oak Ridge National
Laboratory. The goal is to deliver a system that can perform 1.5
exaflops: 1.5×1018 floating point operations per second.

By way of comparison, a single Nvidia RTX 2080 GPU manages about 14
teraflops of compute performance with 32-bit numbers. Frontier will
achieve 100,000 times more. The fastest supercomputer in the Top 500
list weighs in at 200 petaflops, or 0.2 exaflops. As things stand,
it'd take the top 160 machines on the list to match Frontier's
performance.

Frontier will use custom versions of AMD's Epyc processors (likely Zen
3 or Zen 4), matched with 4 GPUs, all connected using AMD's Infinity
Fabric. Between nodes, Cray's Slingshot interconnect will be used,
which has transfer rates of up to 200Gb/s per port. The GPUs will have
their own stacked HBM (High Bandwidth Memory). It'll be housed in 100
cabinets, taking about 7,300 square feet of floor space. Power
consumption will be 30-40MW.

The plan is for Frontier to be delivered in 2021, at a cost of about
$500 million for the hardware and $100 million for research and
development. It should be the fastest supercomputer in the world when
it's delivered, and it will be the US government's second
exaflops-capable system; the first will be the 1 exaflops Aurora,
built using Intel Xeon SP processors and Intel Xe GPUs.'

-- source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/05/cray-amd-to-build-1-5-exaflops-supercomputer-for-us-government/

Cheers, Peter
-- 
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/
http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
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