US will get exascale supercomputer with Intel Xe GPUs in 2021

Intel and Cray will build an exascale cluster for the U.S. Department of Energy to be delivered in 2021. The supercomputer will have Intel’s Xeon CPUs, Optane memory and Xe GPUs.

The system will be called Aurora and will be located at the Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago. The construction involves a $500 million contract. The supercomputer cluster will be used for scientific research for the US Department of Energy.

The supercomputer is built around Xeon processors, Optane DC memory and Intel’s Xe architecture. Intel is working under the name Xe on graphics chips that are intended for multiple markets and that should appear in, for example, consumer video cards and accelerators for data centers and supercomputers.

The Aurora supercomputer will be based on Cray’s Shasta platform and will consist of more than 200 compute cabinets. The interconnections concern Cray’s Slingshot interconnects and Cray will optimize its Shasta software stack for Intel’s architecture.

The Aurora is one of several exascale supercomputers on the way. These computer clusters provide computing power of an exaflops, 1018 flops, or one billion billion floating operations per second. In comparison, the IBM Summit system at the US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory currently tops the Top500 list of supercomputers with performance of 143.5 petaflops and a peak of 200.8 petaflops.