The US Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory gets a new supercomputer called Polaris, with A100 GPUs from Nvidia and EPYC processors from AMD. Polaris will prepare software for the late Intel Aurora supercomputer.
Polaris exists according to ANL employment nvidia of 560 nodes, each containing an AMD EPYC processor and four Nvidia A100 GPUs. So the total number of GPUs in Polaris is 2,240. This makes it the largest GPU supercomputer within the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility attached. The supercomputer will be delivered and installed this year, and is supposed to be operational by early 2022.
The Argonne National Laboratory does not list specific AMD EPYC models, but HPC wire He writes that initially it was a second-generation EPYC Rome 7532 CPU with 32 Zen 2 CPUs. In March 2022, the system is set to move to the third generation EPYC Milan 7343 processors. They also have 32 cores but are based on the microarchitecture of Zen 3 from AMD. This gives Polaris a total of 17,920 CPU cores.
According to Argonne National Laboratory, Polaris achieves theoretical computing power of up to 1.4 exaflops on artificial intelligence computing tasks. The double precision fp64 performance will be 44 petaflops. The supercomputer should enable, among other things, scientists and developers to test the upcoming Aurora exascale supercomputer program from the Argonne National Laboratory. ANL talks about testing software and application code for a series of projects in the field of artificial intelligence, engineering and Science”, designed for Aurora supercomputers with Intel CPUs and GPUs.
The Aurora was initially supposed to be delivered this year, but that has been delayed due to delays at Intel. This delay may have led to a deal for this Polaris supercomputer. . sources Reuters This week it reported that Nvidia and AMD will be in talks with Argonne National Laboratory to build a new supercomputer. Polaris’ plans are said to have been made while the lab waits for the Intel supercomputer, according to that news agency. It is unknown how much ANL is paying for Polaris.
