steven36 Posted June 18, 2018 Share Posted June 18, 2018 Will run national security, energy workloads HPE is building the world's largest Arm-based supercomputer, Astra – 2.5 petaFLOPS from 2,592 HPE Apollo 70s – for Sandia National Labs in the US, where it will run advanced modeling and simulation workloads in areas including national security and energy. Apollo 70s have four compute nodes in a 2U case. The CPUs are Cavium Arm v8-A 64-bit Thunder X2 with up to 32 cores and 8 x DDR4 channels. Astra involves 2,592 dual-CPU servers with more than 145,000 cores. Liquid cooling will keep these hot little cores in working order. Astra involves: Message Passing Interface (MPI) MCS30 liquid cooling unit Performance Cluster Manager software Apollo 4520 all-flash storage with a Lustre filesystem Ironically, the 4520s are dual x86 (E5-2600 v4 Series) server systems. It seems Arm CPUs can only take you so far. They have 23 large form factor (3.5-inch) drive bays, designed back in the bulk capacity disk era. HPE has said it is a major stepping stone to exascale; interesting timing when IBM has just delivered the 200 petaFLOPS Summit system - which ostensibly would need only a 2.5 scale-up to reach the fabled 1,000 petaFLOPS exascale level. +Reg comment Might we assume Arm CPUs could feature in an HPE exascale system? It's not a fantastical idea. The Fujitsu Post-K exascale computing project in Japan is based on Arm v8 processors with extensions, making up scalable custom CPU cores. The total Post-K node count is estimated to be more than 10,000. El Reg thinks HPE could be hinting that Arm CPUs will feature in its exascale computing development work. Source Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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