HPE Delivers Second Exascale Supercomputer, Built For AI, In Collaboration With Intel

Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced that it has delivered the world’s second exascale supercomputer, Aurora, in collaboration with Intel to the US Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory. Aurora has reached 1.012 exaflops on 87% of the system, making it the world’s second-fastest supercomputer as verified by the Top 500 list of the most powerful supercomputers, the company said in a press release.

Aurora is also the largest AI-capable system in the world, taking the top spot on the HPL Mixed Precision Benchmark, achieving 10.6 exaflops on 89% of the system, the company said.

Aurora “delivers massive compute capabilities to make breakthrough scientific discoveries and help solve the world’s toughest problems,” said Trish Damkroger, senior vice president and general manager, HPC and AI Infrastructure Solutions at HPE.

An exascale computing system can process one quintillion operations per second. Computational power at this scale makes it possible to address many complex problems. Aurora is built with the HPE Cray EX supercomputer, and is also the largest deployment of open, Ethernet-based supercomputing interconnect—HPE Slingshot—on a single system.

Planned as an AI-capable system, Aurora will enable researchers to use generative AI models to accelerate scientific discovery. AI-driven research that scientists have run on Aurora include brain mapping to better understand the human brain’s 80 billion neurons, high energy particle physics enhanced by deep learning and machine-learning accelerated drug design and discovery.