Lemont, Illinois – The details about the next-generation supercomputer of America were revealed in a ceremony attended by Secretary of Energy Rick Perry and Senator Dick Durbin at Argonne National Laboratory on Monday.
Update: Hewlett Packard Enterprise acquires Cray at a value of about $1.4 billion.
The new supercomputer dubbed Aurora will be one-of-its-kind as it will be 50 times powerful than the most powerful supercomputer Summit which reclaimed the title from the two Chinese supercomputers when it went live last summer, but China will be revealing its first exascale supercomputer in 2020 which will take over Summit as the most powerful supercomputer.
Aurora was announced in 2015 as a standard supercomputer but it was scaled to exascale in 2017. Exascale supercomputers like Aurora can perform at quintillion calculations per second, according to the DOE’s Exascale Computing Project.
What is Exascale?
Exa basically means bigger than the biggest, comparing with your average CPU which have hundreds or gigaflops, a thousand gigaflops makes a teraflop and a thousand teraflops make a petaflop and a thousand petaflops make an exaflop. Summit has 200 petaflops and now you can understand how powerful Aurora will be when it comes live in 2021.
In terms of speed we can say that a exascale supercomputer can process 100,000 HD movies in one second.
“We will use exascale computing and AI to accelerate discovery, spur ingenuity, drive innovation, and above all, we will impact all of those areas in ways that just a few years ago we couldn’t have realized that we were going to have the ability to do,” Perry said.
Intel Corporation in partnership with Cray and Argonne will built the exascale supercomputer Aurora which will be valued at $500 million said Paul Dabbar. Rajeeb Hazra Intel Corporate VP and GM for enterprise and government group refused to give any details about the architecture of Aurora.
DOE believes that the Exascale supercomputer will boost up the scientific research work with machine learning and artificial intelligence which is growing rapidly.
United States Department of Energy also announced another supercomputer dubbed as Frontier (1.5 Exaflops) which will be more powerful than Aurora and will be built by AMD and Cray by the year 2021.
As of November 2018, China is currently the world leader in terms of Supercomputers with 227, USA (109) following Japan (31), United Kingdom (20). India has 4 supercomputers and ranks 15th in the list of Top 500 supercomputers.
