2 years ago

Category: Software, Business, Data, Infrastructure, Architecture, artificial-intelligence

Enterprise IT systems provider Hewlett Packard Enterprise will start delivering and installing the computing components that will make up Polaris, a massive supercomputer that will be housed at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois and serve as a testbed for artificial intelligence (AI) and other projects for the lab’s upcoming Aurora exascale system. Once Polaris is assembled and put online in early 2022, it will deliver more than four times the performance of the supercomputers currently being run at Argonne and, at 44 petaFLOPS (44 quadrillion floating-point operations per second) peak performance, would rank as the ninth-fastest system on the twice-yearly Top500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers, based on the most recent list released in June.

This is a very performant system, both in terms of AI as well as classic FP64 for first principles-based simulation.

Beyond getting us ready for Aurora, Polaris will further provide a platform to experiment with the integration of supercomputers and large-scale experiment facilities …

Once online, Polaris initially will be used by researchers participating in such programs as the DOE’s Exascale Computing Project and ALCF’s Aurora Early Science Program, which was created not only to enable scientists, engineers and other users to prepare key applications to run on a system of Aurora’s architecture and scale and to get libraries and infrastructure in place for other production applications, but also to tackle projects that current supercomputers can’t.