Intel Aurora Supercomputer Breaks Exascale Barrier
Josh Norem reports via ExtremeTech: At the recent International supercomputing conference called ISC 2024, Intel's newest Aurora supercomputer installed at Argonne National Laboratory raised a few eyebrows by finally surpassing the exascale barrier. Before this, only AMD's Frontier system had been able to achieve this level of performance. Intel also achieved what it says is the world's best performance for AI at 10.61 "AI exaflops." Intel reported the news on its blog, stating Aurora was now officially the fastest supercomputer for AI in the world. It shares the distinction in collaboration with Argonne National Laboratory and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), which both built and houses the system in its current state, which Intel says was at 87% functionality for the recent tests. In the all-important Linpack (HPL) test, the Aurora computer hit 1.012 exaflops, meaning it has almost doubled the performance on tap since its initial "partial run" in late 2023, where it hit just 585.34 petaflops. The company then said it expected to cross the exascale barrier with Aurora eventually, and now it has. Intel says for the ISC 2024 tests, Aurora was operating with 9,234 nodes. The company notes it ranked second overall in LINPACK, meaning it's still unable to dethrone AMD's Frontier system, which is also an HPE supercomputer. AMD's Frontier was the first supercomputer to break the exascale barrier in June 2022. Frontier sits at around 1.2 exaflops in Linpack, so Intel is knocking on its door but still has a way to go before it can topple it. However, Intel says Aurora came in first in the Linpack-mixed benchmark, reportedly highlighting its unparalleled AI performance. Intel's Aurora supercomputer uses the company's latest CPU and GPU hardware, with 21,248 Sapphire Rapids Xeon CPUs and 63,744 Ponte Vecchio GPUs. When it's fully operational later this year, Intel believes the system will eventually be capable of crossing the 2-exaflop barrier.
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