First Exascale Supercomputer To Be Delivered To Argonne

LEMONT, IL — The Argonne National Laboratory will receive the first exascale supercomputer in 2021, according to a release from the U.S. Department of Energy. Intel and the U.S. Department of Energy will deliver the supercomputer, which is the first with a performance of one exaFLOP in the United States.

According to a release, the system developed at Argonne, named "Aurora" will be used to advance scientific research and discovery. The contract is valued at more than $500 million and will be delivered to Argonne National Laboratory by Intel and sub-contractor Cray, Inc. in 2021.

The release states that some of the breakthrough research projects range from developing extreme-scale cosmological simulations, to discovering new approaches for drug response prediction, to discovering materials for the creation of more efficient organic solar cells.

“Achieving exascale is imperative, not only to better the scientific community, but also to better the lives of everyday Americans,” U.S. Secretary of Energy Rick Perry said in a release. “Aurora and the next generation of exascale supercomputers will apply HPC and AI technologies to areas such as cancer research, climate modeling and veterans’ health treatments. The innovative advancements that will be made with exascale will have an incredibly significant impact on our society.”

“Today is an important day not only for the team of technologists and scientists who have come together to build our first exascale computer — but also for all of us who are committed to American innovation and manufacturing,” Bob Swan, Intel CEO, said in a release. “The convergence of AI and high-performance computing is an enormous opportunity to address some of the world’s biggest challenges and an important catalyst for economic opportunity.”

According to a release, Tte foundation of the Aurora supercomputer will be new Intel technologies designed for the convergence of artificial intelligence and high-performance computing at extreme computing scale. Aurora will also use Cray’s next-generation supercomputer system, code-named “Shasta."

“There is tremendous scientific benefit to our nation that comes from collaborations like this one with the Department of Energy, Argonne National Laboratory, industry partners Intel and Cray and our close association with the University of Chicago,” said Argonne National Laboratory Director, Paul Kearns, in a release. “Argonne’s Aurora system is built for next-generation artificial intelligence and will accelerate scientific discovery by combining high-performance computing and artificial intelligence to address real world problems, such as improving extreme weather forecasting, accelerating medical treatments, mapping the human brain, developing new materials and further understanding the universe — and those are just the beginning.”

“Cray is proud to be partnering with Intel and Argonne to accelerate the pace of discovery and innovation across a broad range of disciplines,”Peter Ungaro, president and CEO of Cray, said in a release. “We are excited that Shasta will be the foundation for the upcoming exascale era, characterized by extreme performance capability, new data-centric workloads and heterogeneous computing.”