AMD and Nvidia-Powered Polaris Supercomputer: Putting Together for Intel’s Delayed Aurora

A supercomputer is a system that performs at the highest functioning rate for computers. Usually, these have been used for engineering and scientific applications that must manage huge databases or perform a great amount of computation. The US energy department “Argonne National Lab” has appointed Nvidia’s A100 graphics card paired with AMD’s microprocessors for its latest Polaris CPU, a move mostly thought essential due to the late Aurora supercomputer powered by Intel. The system hit a problem due to manufacturing difficulties with Sapphire Rapids server chips from Intel.

Argonne National Laboratory

ANL (Argonne National Laboratory) is an engineering and science research national lab operated by Argonne for the United States energy department. Located outside Chicago, the facility is the largest national lab by scope and size in the Midwest. Argonne Laboratory is paving its way for the first tested exascale supercomputer, Polaris. Following are some more details about Nvidia vs. AMD 2021 upcoming supercomputer.

Performance

The latest entry from ANL will have two AMD CPUs per node and four Nvidia A100s for a combined 2,240 Nvidia graphics cards spread across 560 nodes. It will provide PetaFLOPS up to 44 of FP64 performance, which means it will be a much-reduced powerful device than the intentional Aurora supercomputer exascale that will provide up to a single ExaFLOP of continuous performance when it reaches by the end of 2022 or at the start of 2023.

In difference, Polaris will go to a performance level of 1.4 “AI ExaFLOPS,” which is not estimated with the normal FP64 load used to count supercomputer performance. This means that Polaris is not an exascale-class device. However, we have to see a deliberated Nvidia-powered computer that will attain that specific mark. Still, Polaris PetaFLOPs 44 of performance is eligible for a spot in the top 10 of the Top 500 list of quickest supercomputers in the world.

Features 

The computer will boost transformative scientific search, such as propelling particle collision research, exploring clean energy, and advancing cancer treatments to discover new methods to physics. Moreover, it will transfer the ALCF (Argonne Leadership Computing Facility) into the age of exascale Artificial Intelligence by allowing researchers to upgrade their scientific assignments for Aurora, Argonne’s upcoming exascale system.

Design & Specifications

As informed, we can say that Polaris is projected to utilize around 2 Megawatts of power at full operation, which diminishes in contrast to Aurora’s 60 Megawatts. Talking about Aurora Supercomputer Specs, Polaris will come with 560 nodes as compared with Aurora’s deliberated 9,000 nodes. The supercomputer will also utilize Cray’s Sling networking material, which means the system is formed by HPE (Hewlett Packard Enterprise).

High-performance computing Wire said that Epyc Rome 32-core 7532 computers would be utilized at first, then altered in March 2022 to the latest Epyc Milan 32-core 7543 chips. Also, Polaris will be updated afterward from a 10 Slingshot to the 11 Slingshot fabric to meet Aurora, verifying that Intel does not manage to interact with Aurora. It utilizes 40 racks of generation 10 Apollo servers.

The AMD Supercomputer Delay is so far another setback for Intel’s previous HPC attempts. Actually, Aurora was initially planned as a much slighter 180-PetaFLOP device that would begin in 2018, but Intel Xeon Phi CPUs were overdue and ultimately canceled, which leads to a whole restructuring of the Aurora system to an Exascale one powered by Intel Ponte Vecchio graphics cards and Sapphire Rapids graphics cards. In reality, Intel just revealed that it established a key feature of its Ponte Vecchio graphics cards, the Tile Xe, that boost communication among collected computer parts, explicitly at the demand of the DoE (Department of Energy) for Aurora. That determination took a whole year of progress work.

The department of energy has committed the second amendment of Aurora is delayed from its innovative launch in 2021, which is not amazing given that Intel efforts with its 10 nanometers Improved Superfine node, renamed as Intel 7, utilized for the Rapids Sapphire CPUs. Now, as an outcome, Aurora is planning for placement in the timeframe of 2022-2023, handing over the label of the world’s initial exascale computer to AMD-pushed Frontier. Also, AMD’s device will continue apace and will be the fastest.

With its diverse GPU-CPU architecture, Polaris supports Argonne in making the shift to the HPE Intel Aurora system, which falls over on Intel roadmap delays from 2021 to 2022 (impacting Ponte Vecchio and Sapphire Rapids). It will be utilized by scientists within the department of energy’s Exascale Computation Project as well as the ALCF science program to start booting up their codes for Aurora.

Advantages 

• Advancing cancer treatment by boosting research in realizing the function of bio variables in tumor growth by progressing the usage of data science to do an analysis of maximum-scale fluid-structure-interplay simulations; as well as forecasting drug reply to tumor cells by allowing billions of simulated drugs to be partitioned from single to several combinations while foreseeing their effects on cells.
• The LAB is increasing physical science boundaries with particle collision study in the ATLAS test, which practices the LHC (Large Hadron Collider), the most powerful particle accelerator in the world, sited at CERN (European Council for Nuclear Research), near Geneva, Switzerland. 

Final Verdict

The new supercomputer has multi graphics card nodes as well as supports the programming devices. It has got a similar interconnect Slingshot that will be available on Aurora. Early Science Program has workings in normally traditional HPC simulation, but also the learning space and data. So, the company wanted optimized Python support, a number of optimized frameworks, and things that will be accessible on Aurora for these apps to grow. That is available with HPE and Nvidia solutions. In the meantime, Polaris is now in the final stages of setting up and will be ready for its initial research in 2022, with extended availability to the study community in Q2 2022. We hope that you enjoyed this review. We will come with another one soon.