Argonne’s Aurora Supercomputer Showing Encouraging Performance Figures

Argonne National Laboratory said its new exascale computer is showing strong early performance numbers during its stabilization period.

According to Argonne, the Aurora supercomputer achieved over 585 petaflops of computing power on 5,439 nodes, putting it among the top 500 strongest supercomputers in the world. Michael Papka, director of the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, said the early performance figures show the supercomputer’s potential for scientific computing.

Argonne built Aurora in partnership with Intel and Hewlett Packard Enterprise. It has 166 racks and 10,624 nodes, over 21,200 Intel Xeon CPU Max Series processors and over 63,700 Intel Data Center GPU Mas Series processors, ALCF said Thursday.

The Department of Energy’s national laboratories see value in supercomputers, according to research figures released in August.

According to the study, Oak Ridge National Lab’s Frontier supercomputer helped run Lawrence Livermore National Lab’s HiOp high-performance computing software, enabling simulations that identify over 100,000 potential grid failures, contingencies and weather scenarios within minutes. The output is significantly more impactful than commodity computing hardware, which can only produce 100 contingencies and at least five weather scenarios.