TECH NEWS | Next-gen AMD chips to power world’s fastest supercomputer
Tech giant AMD recently joined Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and HPE in announcing that El Capitan, the upcoming exascale class supercomputer at LLNL.
Tech giant AMD recently joined Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and HPE in announcing that El Capitan, the upcoming exascale class supercomputer at LLNL, would be powered by the next generation AMD EPYC CPUs, AMD Radeon Instinct GPUs and open source AMD ROCm heterogeneous computing software.
With delivery expected in early 2023, the El Capitan system is expected to be the world’s fastest supercomputer with more than 2 exaflops of double precision performance. This record setting performance would support National Nuclear Security Administration requirements for its primary mission of ensuring the safety, security and reliability of the nation’s nuclear stockpile.
The AMD based nodes would be optimized to accelerate artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) workloads to potentially enable the expanded use of AI and ML into the research, computational techniques and analysis that benefits NNSA missions.
“El Capitan will drive unprecedented advancements in HPC and AI, powered by the next generation AMD EPYC CPUs and Radeon Instinct GPUs,” said Forrest Norrod, senior vice president and general manager, Datacenter and Embedded Systems Group, AMD. “Building on our strong foundation in high-performance computing and adding transformative coherency capabilities, AMD is enabling the NNSA Tri-Lab community—LLNL and the Los Alamos and Sandia national laboratories—to achieve their mission critical objectives and contribute new AI advancements to the industry. We are extremely proud to continue our exascale work with HPE and NNSA and look forward to the delivery of the most powerful supercomputer in the world expected in early 2023.”
AMD is applying its experience from the high-performance computing industry and advancing its existing CPU and GPU designs for El Capitan, enabling the system to be architected for maximum performance and ease of use.
“This unprecedented computing capability, powered by advanced CPU and GPU technology from AMD, will sustain America’s position on the global stage in high performance computing and provide an observable example of the commitment of the country to maintaining an unparalleled nuclear deterrent,” said LLNL Lab Director Bill Goldstein.
“Today’s news provides a prime example of how government and industry can work together for the benefit of the entire nation.”
