HPE, Intel Power World’s Second Exascale Supercomputer

Hewlett Packard Enterprise has turned over Aurora, the world’s second exascale supercomputer, to the Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory.

A product of collaboration among HPE, Intel, Argonne and the DOE, Aurora delivers over one exaflop of processing power, making it the second-fastest supercomputer in the world, HPE said.

Moreover, Aurora is the world’s largest artificial intelligence-capable system, allowing researchers to leverage generative AI models in accelerating scientific research. Scientists have already conducted early AI-powered research on Aurora for various fields such as brain mapping, drug discovery and high-energy particle physics at speed.

The supercomputer also features the world’s largest graphics processing unit cluster, integrating 21,248 Intel Xeon CPU Max Series processors and 63,744 Intel Data Center GPU Max units.

An open science system, Aurora is currently located at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility. Researchers have also run various programming models and applications on Aurora to test and optimize the system’s performance.

Ogi Brkic, vice president and general manager of Intel’s data center AI solutions unit, said Aurora has already yielded promising initial scientific advancements and highlighted its potential for even greater scientific progress.