U.S. near deal for Nvidia (+AMD Epyc-equipped) supercomputer as it waits for delayed Intel machine -sources

No rumour any longer: The Argonne National Laboratory confirmed “Polaris” via official press-release.

Polaris' Specs …

• Delivers approx. 44 Petaflops peak double-precision, and ~1.4 Exaflops theoretical AI-performance

• 280× HPE Apollo 65xx Gen10 Plus systems, w/ 560 × 2^nd (Rome) and 3^rd (Milan) Gen AMD EPYC™ processors

• 2,240× Nvidia A100 nVidia^® GPU-accelerators /w Tensor-cores – ALCF’s largest GPU-based system to date

• Using HPE's Slingshot high-performance Ethernet-fabric, designed for HPC and AI solutions

The Reuters-article also mentions …

When Aurora was first announced, Intel and Argonne said the machine would be delivered in 2021, but Intel still has not delivered the key Ponte Vecchio and Sapphire Rapids chips. Intel said in June that the Sapphire Rapids chips would not be in production until 2022, and on Tuesday Intel spokesperson Will Moss said the company remained committed to delivering the computer in 2022.

Kudos go out to u/Oneoverbeta, who linked additional background-information and full story on Argonne's and HPE's web-sites respectively. Seems components arriving now at Argonne for Polaris-installation. Again, thank you chap!

The supercomputer wars are going to be very exciting in the coming years. The big players (intel, AMD, and Nvidia) are working to be as vertically integrated as possible, and it’s leading to some interesting developments. It’s no wonder Nvidia wants to get their hands on ARM. They don’t want to rely on their competition for the processors to these types of contracts. Especially with both intel and AMD pushing their own GPU solutions. If I’m remembering correctly, this might be Nvidia’s first announced exascale contract, at least publicly. It’s a pretty significant gap compared to both intel and AMD, and it seems that Intel’s own delays is what gave them the opportunity. I would expect even if the ARM acquisition ends up in flames, nvidia is still going to pick up some ARM based chip maker, like Ampere.

Hey OP — Your post has been removed as it is not in compliance with Rule 4. Please read the rules or message the mods for any further clarification.

Hey OP — Your post has been removed for not complying with rule 9. Please read the rules or message the mods for any further clarification