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US Reveals Details of $500 Million Supercomputer (nytimes.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: The Department of Energy disclosed details on Monday of one of the most expensive computers being built: a $500 million machine based on Intel and Cray technology that may become crucial in a high-stakes technology race between the United States and China (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source). The supercomputer, called Aurora, is a retooling of a development effort first announced in 2015 and is scheduled to be delivered to the Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago in 2021. Lab officials predict it will be the first American machine to reach a milestone called "exascale" performance, surpassing a quintillion calculations per second. That's roughly seven times the speed rating of the most powerful system built to date, or 1,000 times faster than the first "petascale" systems that began arriving in 2008. Backers hope the new machines will let researchers create significantly more accurate simulations of phenomena such as drug responses, climate changes, the inner workings of combustion engines and solar panels.
Aurora, which far exceeds the $200 million price for Summit, represents a record government contract for Intel and a test of its continued leadership in supercomputers. The Silicon Valley giant's popular processors -- the calculating engine for nearly all personal computers and server systems -- power most such machines. But additional accelerator chips are considered essential to reach the very highest speeds, and its rival Nvidia has built a sizable business adapting chips first used with video games for use in supercomputers. The version of Aurora announced in 2015 was based on an Intel accelerator chip that the company later discontinued. A revised plan to seek more ambitious performance targets was announced two years later. Features discussed on Monday include unreleased Intel accelerator chips, a version of its standard Xeon processor, new memory and communications technology and a design that packages chips on top of each other to save space and power.
Aurora, which far exceeds the $200 million price for Summit, represents a record government contract for Intel and a test of its continued leadership in supercomputers. The Silicon Valley giant's popular processors -- the calculating engine for nearly all personal computers and server systems -- power most such machines. But additional accelerator chips are considered essential to reach the very highest speeds, and its rival Nvidia has built a sizable business adapting chips first used with video games for use in supercomputers. The version of Aurora announced in 2015 was based on an Intel accelerator chip that the company later discontinued. A revised plan to seek more ambitious performance targets was announced two years later. Features discussed on Monday include unreleased Intel accelerator chips, a version of its standard Xeon processor, new memory and communications technology and a design that packages chips on top of each other to save space and power.
Climate change? Solar panels? This project is as good as cancelled.
The new fad is a super computing race! Who needs to go to space when you can simulate it in your back yard.
But not before it reports the answer:
42
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
So since all "computers" are Turing complete, they can all produce the same results - it's just a matter of processing time and having enough memory to hold the needed data. So this computer can't actually accomplish anything more than before. It can just fulfill a greater workload. Or am I mistaken?
Better known as 318230.
You could name a whole list of usage of such a computer but there is only one one with the real budgets, because it currently is only allowed to be tested in simulations, and that use is what the department of energy is all about.
>> Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago
You know what else is next to Chicago? Aurora, Illinois. (Wayne's World's home - and 37 miles from Argonne.)
I am tempted to go through all the techie and sci-fi uses of the term "Aurora" and make a single record of them all. From spaceship names to project codenames, it seems to be everywhere.
And the female name Kira, Qi'ra, etc.
Right before it was going to report the answer, Windows 10 decided it was time for an update. Once installed, the update broke all audio output. Now we'll never know!
You tell 'em.
That's pretty funny and all seeing as that was a great book. But nobody has said anything about the security of such a computer using Intel parts. Also Intel is about to take a back seat in IPC for at least a few months until they can get their 10nm process working(3 years later or so). Then I also thought price. If this Intel build costs $500M, and uses core technology(not secure)... I'm sure they could build a far more secure system from AMD for about 2/3 the money for the same, if not more performance with ZEN 2. Just my thoughts, something seems odd about all of this.
The department of energy has so many computer I would be shocked to know if any of those are working 24/7. I can't believe they really need yet another super computer to perform stupid task. This is not about science, it's about give money to friend and pride to hold the fastest computer.
Security? You think it will be connected to the open Internet?
Always wondered: which dumpster does all of this go in when they upgrade, and how cheaply can I steal it for?
You cannot afford to run a Cray C-90 even if you found one in a scrap heap. Just buying the coolant would break you and don't get me started on that electric bill.
I know, I know, the C-90's are 20+ years old now..
I just expect that a "Super Computer" of today, will be as useless as a Cray C-90 was when they hit the scrap heap.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Well, considering all of the other shit that is connected to the open internet that shouldn't be. Do you trust the govt morons that much?
... this imagines Beowulf cluster of you!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
It runs at an expected 1 exaflops but with the Spectre prevention it'll be running at just under 900 petaflops.
A friend of mine worked on the Oak Ridge Summit super computer that brought online last year. The power requirements for running the thing are astonishing in and of themselves. More or less a small city's worth of electricity.
Peace is easy to achieve, just surrender. Liberty is much harder get/keep.
According to a report by The Register, Fujitsu will use ARM to build an exascale supercomputer, which is called Post K.
According to a report by InsideHPC, the supercomputer will debut in 2021, which is the same year in which Aurora will debut.
According to another report by InsideHPC, the ARM supercomputer will be tuned for high performance in machine-learning applications.
Fearing an economic Pearl Harbor, Washington quickly asked Cray to develop an answer to Post K. Aurora is the answer.
Before we get to zettascale computing we need to improve resilience. When you are running MPI jobs with 50000 CPU cores you need to really start tolerating single-node failures gracefully. Aborting the job is no longer a desirable option and checkpointing can be exceedingly costly for many workloads.
Every end has half a stick.
Sorry, couldn't resist.
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