US Department of Energy and Intel join race to build world's first exascale supercomputer

Aurora will be the world's first exascale supercomputer - if it is built on time

The US Department of Energy (DOE) and Intel have joined the race to build the world's first exascale supercomputer.

The $500 million Intel-powered machine will be built at the DOE's Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago. It is expected to be delivered in 2021.

Intel is working with the main contractor Cray Computing, providing Xeon processors that will power the machine.

"Argonne National Laboratory's first exascale computer is coming soon, and will exclusively serve the research community. Scientists will use the new machine, named Aurora, to pursue some of the farthest-reaching science and engineering breakthroughs ever achieved with supercomputing," Argonne National Laboratory says on its website.

When completed, the supercomputing system will be able to perform a quintillion calculations (1,000,000,000,000,000,000 or one exaflop) per second. That is five times faster than the IBM-built Summit supercomputer, currently operating at the DOE's Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Aurora will be used to advance scientific research and discovery, in such areas as nuclear research (simulating nuclear blasts), modelling the universe and predicting drug responses. The system will also come with artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to assist in projects such as material designing for more efficient organic solar cells.

Aurora will feature a variety of Intel chip technologies designed for high performance computing (HPC) and AI at extreme computing scale. These include Intel's next-gen Xeon Scalable processor, Xe compute architecture, Optane flash memory, and One API software. Aurora developers also plan to use Cray's Shasta family, including its high performance Slingshot interconnect.

Aurora is part of the DOE's Exascale Computing Project (ECP), which aims to speed-up research to design and create exascale supercomputing systems in the US.

Under the ECP project, six companies - Intel, Cray, AMD, IBM, HPE, and Nvidia - have been selected and allocated funds amounting to about $258 million over a three-year contract period starting 2017.

These companies are required to provide additional funds, amounting to minimum 40 per cent of the total project cost.

Assuming that the Aurora project is completed by 2021, it ought to become the most powerful supercomputer of the US - but it could still be beaten to the title of the world's first exascale supercomputer.

Engineers in China are currently working to build the world's most powerful supercomputer, which could be unveiled later this year.

Japanese scientists are also working on Post-K exascale computer that is expected to be competed in 2020. At the moment, however, two IBM supercomputers sit on the summit of the Top-500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers.

The US had already planned to have an exascale supercomputing up and running by now, with Intel providing what it labelled its Knights Hill chip - a high-end multi-core Xeon Phi processor - to a Cray-built Aurora going live last year. However, Intel's Knights Hill processor never formally emerged from the labs.

China's supercomputer initiative is led by its Tianhe-3 project, that is intended to be up-and-running in 2020. Japan, meanwhile, is also in the race with a Post-K supercomputer with CPUs based on the ARM architecture.