44-PFLOPS Polaris ‘testbed’ ordered ahead of Chipzilla-powered Aurora
Uncle Sam’s Argonne National Laboratory has ordered Polaris – a supercomputer to be built from AMD Epyc processors and Nvidia GPUs – to test its applications in anticipation of eventually getting the Intel-delayed Aurora super. Polaris will be capable of reaching 44 petaFLOPS of performance at double-precision or FP64, we’re told, making it about as fast as the eighth most-powerful supercomputer in the latest top-500 list. In terms of its AI prowess, it is said it can achieve a maximum performance of 1.4 exaFLOPs at mixed-precision or FP16. It will be built using HPE’s Apollo Gen10 Plus architecture, and contain 560 second and third-generation AMD Epyc processors as well as 2,240 Nvidia A100 GPUs. Polaris is expected to be up and running early next year at Argonne, which is run by the US Dept of Energy. The machine has been described as a “testbed supercomputer,” a stepping stone that will help Argonne “prepare critical workloads for future exascale systems”.
