British Archer 2 supercomputer gets 11,696 AMD Epyc CPUs
The United Kingdom Research and Innovation organization announced this week that Cray will deliver its new supercomputer. The Archer 2 runs on 11,696 Epyc Rome CPUs for a total of 748,544 cores at 2.2GHz.
The Archer 2 supercomputer contains 5848 compute nodes, each with two AMD Epyc CPUs with 64 cores running at 2.2GHz. In total, this yields 748,544 cores, which should provide an expected peak performance of 28 petaflops. The Archer 2 has a total of 1.57 petabytes of system memory, and is housed in 23 water-cooled Shasta Mountain server cabinets. The computer contains 14.5PB of storage space with the Luster file system and 1.1PB of flash memory with the Luster BurstBuffer file system.
The new supercomputer will be connected to a 100Gbit/s network with dragonfly topology consisting of 46 compute groups, an I/O group and a service group. There are also Rasta River racks for management and post-processing. The Archer 2 uses future-generation AMD GPUs. Presumably this concerns Instinct GPUs.
The Archer 2 is up to 8.7 times faster than the current Archer supercomputer in CP2K workloads, according to UKRI. This is a program that allows scientists to run molecular simulations. Also, the supercomputer is 9.5 times faster in OpenSBLI, 11.3 times faster in Castep, 12.9 times faster in Gromacs for chemical simulations, and 18 times faster in HadGEM3. The latter program is used for weather forecasts. The original Archer supercomputer will be shut down on February 18, 2020, after which the installation of the Archer 2 will start. The Archer 2 is expected to be operational in May 2020. UKRI will begin a 30-day stress test on May 6. During this period, the organization hopes to identify and resolve potential problems.
AMD seems to be gaining more and more market share in the supercomputer space. Earlier this year, supercomputer manufacturer Cray announced the Frontier supercomputer. The Frontier becomes the world’s most powerful supercomputer at 1.5 exaflops, and also uses AMD hardware. At 1.5 exaflops, the Frontier gets more than 31 times more computing power than the Archer 2. The Frontier uses custom Epyc processors based on a ‘future Zen architecture’. In addition, the Frontier uses future Radeon Instinct GPUs from AMD. The system will cost a total of about 600 million dollars, which, converted at the current dollar rate, amounts to about 543 million euros. Cray will deliver the Frontier to the American Oak Ridge National Laboratory in 2021.
The current Archer supercomputer. Photo via EPCC