Aurora is a planned state-of-the-art exascale supercomputer designed by Intel/Cray for the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF). The system is expected to become the first supercomputer in the United States to break the exaFLOPS barrier.

History

Originally announced in April 2015, Aurora was planned to be delivered in 2018 and have a peak performance of 180 petaFLOPS. The system was expected to be the world's most powerful system at the time. The system was intended to be built by Cray based on Intel's 3rd generation Xeon Phi (Knights Hill microarchitecture). In November 2017 Intel announced that Aurora has been shifted to 2021 and will be scaled up to 1 exaFLOPS. The system will likely become the first supercomputer in the United States to break the exaFLOPS barrier. As part of the announcement Knights Hill was canceled and instead be replaced by a "new platform and new microarchitecture specifically designed for exascale".

Original Specifications

Original Specs
Computing Power	180 PFLOPS
Compute Nodes	>50,000
Processor	3rd Generation Intel Xeon Phi (Knights Hill)
Memory	>7 PB DRAM and persistent memory
Fabric	2nd Generation Intel Omni-Path Architecture with silicon photonics
File System	Intel® Lustre* File System
File System Capacity	>150 Petabytes
File System Throughput	>1 Terabyte/s
Peak Power	13 MW
FLOP/s Per Watt	>13 GigaFLOP/s per watt
Facility Area	~3,000 sq. ft.

Documents

Original System

• Ushering in a New Era, Argonne National Laboratory’s Aurora System, April 2015
• Aurora Fact Sheet

External links

• Aurora

References

• Introducing Aurora, April 9, 2015
• U.S. Department of Energy Selects Intel to Deliver Nation’s Most Powerful Supercomputer at Argonne National Laboratory, April 9, 2015
• Unleashing High-Performance Computing Today and Tomorrow, November 13, 2017