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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday March 05 2020, @07:45PM   Printer-friendly
from the bigger,better,-faster dept.

El Capitan Supercomputer Detailed: AMD CPUs & GPUs To Drive 2 Exaflops of Compute

This afternoon the DOE and HPE are announcing the architectural details of the [El Capitan] supercomputer, revealing that AMD will be providing both the CPUs and accelerators (GPUs), as well as revising the performance estimate for the supercomputer. Already expected to be the fastest of the US's exascale systems, El Capitan was originally commissioned as a 1.5 exaflop system seven months ago. However thanks to some late configuration changes, the DOE now expects the system to reach 2 exaflops once it's fully installed, which would cement its place at the top of the US's supercomputer inventory.

Overall, El Capitan is the second (and apparently final) system being built as part of the US DOE's CORAL-2 program for supercomputers. Like the similar Frontier system, El Capitan comes with a $600 million price tag and is intended to ensure the US's leadership in supercomputers in the exascale era. LLNL will be using the system to replace Sierra, their current IBM Power 9 + NVIDIA Volta supercomputer. All told, El Capitan will be 16 times more powerful than the system it replaces. LLNL will be using it primary for nuclear weapons modeling – substituting for actual weapon testing – while the system will also see secondary use as a research system in other fields, particularly those where machine learning can be applied.

[...] On the CPU side of matters, AMD will be supplying a standard version of their Zen 4-based "Genoa" EPYC processor. As it's still two generations out from AMD's current wares, the amount of information on Zen 4/Genoa is limited, but AMD is promising support for next-generation memory, Infinity Fabric 3, as well as broad promises of both single and multi-threaded performance leadership. Notably, this is a greater level of detail on the CPU than we currently have for Frontier, which is using an unspecified and customized next-generation EPYC CPU.

See also: AMD's CPU-to-GPU Infinity Fabric Detailed

Also at Wccftech.

Previously:
Cray and AMD Will Build a 1.5 Exaflops Supercomputer by 2021

June 2019 TOP500 List: All 500 Systems Above 1 Petaflops


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by ikanreed on Thursday March 05 2020, @08:50PM (2 children)

    by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Thursday March 05 2020, @08:50PM (#967087) Journal

    You'd also think the departman of defense wouldn't be involved in invading other countries, the department of education wouldn't be responsible mostly for shutting down schools, the department of justice wasn't responsible for major injustices.

    Newspeak is quite normal for american governance.

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  • (Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Thursday March 05 2020, @09:23PM (1 child)

    by PartTimeZombie (4827) on Thursday March 05 2020, @09:23PM (#967098)

    The Department of Defence used to be known as the War Department. War is bad, but defence is good, I suppose.

    • (Score: 2) by ikanreed on Thursday March 05 2020, @09:29PM

      by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Thursday March 05 2020, @09:29PM (#967102) Journal

      It was aspirational at the time "Wow, WW2 really sucked, what if we had a new world order where we didn't invade each other and made peace by preparing for war" But that has proven to be pure Orwellianism.