Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has announced that it will deliver the world’s fastest exascale-class supercomputer for the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) at a record-breaking speed of 2 exaflops – 10X faster than today’s most powerful supercomputer.
The new system, which the DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) has named El Capitan, is expected to be delivered in early 2023.
The DOE’s El Capitan will use next-generation AMD EPYC processors, codenamed “Genoa” featuring the “Zen 4” processor core, next-generation AMD Radeon Instinct GPUs, based on a new compute-optimized architecture, and the 3rd Generation AMD Infinity Architecture, which will provide a high-bandwidth, low latency connection between the CPUs and GPUs.
The new next-generation AMD Radeon Instinct GPUs are based on a new compute optimized architecture for workloads including High Performance Computing (HPC) and Artificial Intelligence (AI).
The new performance record of 2 exaflops (2,000 petaflops) will be more powerful than the Top 200 fastest supercomputers in the world combined and is an increase of more than 30% from initially projected estimates calculated seven months ago.
El Capitan is based on HPE’s Cray Shasta architecture. Cray Shasta technologies were built from the ground up to support a diverse set of processor and accelerator technologies to meet new levels of performance and scalability.
Systems like the DOE’s El Capitan are ushering in a new class of supercomputing with exascale-class systems that are 1,000X faster than the previous generation petascale systems first introduced 12 years ago.
In addition to the DOE’s El Capitan, HPE will deliver the other two U.S DOE exascale systems announced in 2019, Aurora and Frontier