The Awesomeness of Aurora: The Newest Exascale Supercomputer

Intel collaborated with HPE and Argonne National Laboratory belonging to the US Department of Energy to create a super computer called Aurora, whose speed has reached Exascale calculations.

To date, only two computers have reached that level. The first is Frontier -- which uses an AMD processor --, which is also the fastest super computer in the world, and now there is Aurora which has penetrated Exascale.

Aurora has actually been around since 2023, and in November 2023 it was named by the Top500 as the number 2 fastest computer in the world. However, at that time the system was not fully operational, and "only" had a computing capacity of 585 petaFLOPS.

Currently Aurora is not yet fully operational, even though the number of processors and GPU accelerators in operation is already very large. Aurora uses 21,248 Intel XEON CPU Max processors and 63,744 Intel Data Center GPU Max accelerators.

In the last test, performance reached 1,012 exaflops, even though the number of active nodes was only 9,234 from 10,624, as quoted by from Techspot, Tuesday (14/5/2024).

Aurora's performance was higher when running the HPL-MxP mixed-precision benchmark, with a score of 10.6 exaflops for AI performance, even though only 89% of the system was active. This test is different from Linpack which uses FP64 Precision, HPL-MxP uses FP32 and FP16, which better reflects AI processing capabilities.

While FP64 is more widely used in traditional science computing, AI computing and many other applications use lower precision. This means that Linpack is actually not the only measure of the genuine capabilities of a supercomputer.

Aurora has not been able to fully operate due to a number of problems in its system, including cooling problems, operational problems and network instability. However, even if it is fully operational, it seems Aurora still won't be able to overtake Frontier's benchmark score.

For information, Frontier has a computing capacity of 1,206 exaflops, or around 19% higher than Aurora, from 87% of operating components.

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