Sandia National Lab To Install Offset Petascale Supercomputer Powered Past Times Arm Processors (Masayoshi Boy Smiles)

Softbank's chairman paid quite a chip to larn his hands on the crown gem of British high tech.

From Top500:

Sandia National Laboratories volition shortly hold upwardly taking delivery of the world’s most powerful supercomputer using ARM processors. The system, known equally Astra, is beingness built yesteryear Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) in addition to volition deliver 2.3 petaflops of peak performance when it’s installed afterwards this year. 

Astra rendering. Source: HPE

“Sandia National Laboratories has been an active partner inwards leveraging our Arm-based platform since its early on design, in addition to featuring it inwards the deployment of the world’s largest Arm-based supercomputer, is a historical instant non only for us, but for the manufacture equally nosotros race toward achieving exascale computing,” said Mike Vildibill, vice president, Advanced Technology Group, HPE

Astra volition hold upwardly based on HPE’s Apollo lxx organisation in addition to volition hold upwardly comprised of 2,592 dual-socket nodes, containing 145,000 cores – yesteryear far the largest such organisation the companionship has delivered. If it was upwardly in addition to running today, it would easily become far into the upper 5th of the TOP500 list.

Each node volition hold upwardly equipped amongst ii 28-core Cavium ThunderX2 processors running at 2.0 GHz. These aren’t the biggest or the fastest of Cavium’s newest ARM processor, but represents something of a sweetness location inwards price-performance. In aggregate, the compute nodes volition describe 1.2 MW of power, which translates into a respectable liberate energy efficiency for a 2.3-petaflop machine.

Local storage volition hold upwardly supplied yesteryear Apollo A4520 enclosures, providing 350 TB inwards the cast of an all-flash Lustre appliance. Because of the relatively pocket-size capacity in addition to high performance, it volition primarily hold upwardly used for operations needing extreme I/O bandwidth – things similar outburst buffering in addition to file checkpointing.

Prior to the Astra announcement, most of the other activeness amongst consider to ARM-powered HPC was taking house inwards the United Kingdom. HPE had previously announced that 3 UK universities (Edinburgh, Leicester, in addition to Bristol) had ordered Apollo lxx clusters, but each of these systems volition hold upwardly outfitted amongst only 64 nodes in addition to volition function yesteryear out at a mere 74 teraflops. As far equally computational capacity goes, the closest affair to Astra is Isambard, a 10,000-core Cray XC50 supercomputer using these same ThunderX2 processors. It’s ready to hold upwardly deployed at the Great Western 4 (GW4) Alliance, a query consortium of 4 UK universities (Bristol, Bath, Cardiff in addition to Exeter).

Astra’s delivery is the get-go production deployment of the of the Department of Energy’s (DOE) National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) Vanguard Project. The project’s mission is to ensure a feasible HPC ecosystem is established for ARM applied scientific discipline inside the NNSA in addition to the larger DOE community. Besides Sandia, a pose out of other national labs are involved inwards the project, including Lawrence Livermore, Oak Ridge, Argonne, in addition to Los Alamos....

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Keeping inwards heed the novel Summit supercomputer at Oak Ridge turns over at 200 AI-tuned petaflops this latest 'puter is to a greater extent than most offering a dissimilar supercomputer architecture, what amongst the tech Cavium licenses from ARM.

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