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posted by martyb on Friday April 10 2015, @10:12AM   Printer-friendly
from the what-90-quadrillion-rabbit's-ears-look-like dept.

The Register's new sister site, The Platform, broke news of an upcoming 180 petaflops supercomputer named "Aurora" to be installed at the Argonne National Laboratory. The system will reportedly use 2.7x the power (from 4.8 megawatts to 13 megawatts) to deliver 18x the peak performance of Argonne's existing Mira supercomputer (more detail here).

Aurora will use Intel's upcoming 10nm "Knights Hill" Xeon Phi processors and a second-generation Omni-Path optical interconnect with far greater bandwidth than current designs. The storage capacity will exceed 150 petabytes. Cray Inc. will manufacture the system, which will cost $200 million and round out the CORAL trio of supercomputers, including the 150-300 PFLOPS Summit at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the 100+ PFLOPS Sierra at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The other two systems will use IBM Power9 and NVIDIA Volta chips.

An 8.5 petaflops, 1.7 MW secondary system named Theta will be built in 2016.

According to Intel and Argonne National Laboratory:

Research goals for the Aurora system include: more powerful, efficient and durable batteries and solar panels; improved biofuels and more effective disease control; improving transportation systems and enabling production of more highly efficient and quieter engines; and wind turbine design and placement for improved efficiency and reduced noise.

Editor's Note: For the purists, and from a maintainer of the TOP500 list, What is a Mflop/s?:

Mflop/s is a rate of execution, millions of floating point operations per second. Whenever this term is used it will refer to 64 bit floating point operations and the operations will be either addition or multiplication. Gflop/s refers to billions of floating point operations per second and Tflop/s refers to trillions of floating point operations per second.

 
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