A brand-new class of system

Each machine generation provides a fresh challenge to U.S. computer manufacturers—from the racks to the processors to the networking to the I/O system. Similarly, fulfilling the science potential of each new computing architecture requires significant changes to today’s software. The initiative is, and will continue to be, guided by pioneering visionaries in the mathematics and computational science community, stewarded by the DOE’s Office of Science, and operated at the cutting edge.

But while people have been using supercomputers to solve big problems for years, the capabilities of the machines that will soon begin rolling out in national labs around the country will be brand new.

Researchers will be able to run a greater diversity of workloads, including machine learning and data intensive tasks, in addition to traditional simulations. Providing the data science software “stack”—the high-level programming languages, frameworks, and I/O middleware that are conventional toolkits—at exascale, is a major effort in deploying Aurora.
 

Revolutionary architecture

Aurora will feature several technological innovations, including a revolutionary I/O system—the Distributed Asynchronous Object Store (DAOS)—to support new types of workloads. Aurora will be built on a future generation of Intel® Xeon® Scalable processor accelerated by Intel’s Xe compute architecture. HPE Slingshot 11™ fabric and HPE Cray EX supercomputer™ platform will form the backbone of the system. Programming techniques already in use on current systems will apply directly to Aurora. The system will be highly optimized across multiple dimensions that are key to success in simulation, data, and learning applications.

Introducing OneAPI

As the world’s data-centric workloads become more diverse, so do architectures that process that data. Intel’s breadth of architectures span scalar (CPU), vector (GPU), matrix (AI) and spatial (FPGA). These architectures, often referred to at Intel with the acronym SVMS, require an efficient software programming model to deliver performance. oneAPI addresses this with ease-of-use and performance, while eliminating the need to maintain separate code bases, multiple programming languages, and different tools and workflows.

Learn more

Developer Information

We are identifying ways that you can begin preparing your code for the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility’s forthcoming exascale system. Please check out the links provided on this page to get started. We’ll continue to keep update as more information can be made available to the public.

For links to early adopter information, please see alcf.anl.gov/support-center/aurora