The Aurora supercomputer officially reached an exaflopic level of performance, securing second place in the ranking of powerful supercomputers top500 – Ridzh.
After the completion of the Aurora installation, equipped with 21,248 Intel Xeon Max processors and 63,744 GPU Max accelerators, it is set to become the most powerful supercomputer in the world. Despite initially operating at only half of its capabilities, reaching 585 petaflops in 2023, the system is now running at full power and has surpassed 1 exaflop performance, reaching 1.012 exaflops.
Competition is on the horizon, with the El Capitan supercomputer from Liverand National Laboratory expected to debut in the TOP500 rating this fall, boasting a peak performance of 2.3 exaflops – surpassing Aurora by 400 petaflops.
Notably, Aurora lags in energy efficiency, consuming 38.6 MW to achieve exaflop performance, whereas Frontier only requires 22.7 MW for 1.2 exaflops. Despite Frontier breaking the exaflopic barrier in 2022 with a performance of 1.1 exaflops, there is belief that the system has further potential for improvement.
Further advancements are expected in the supercomputing market, with upcoming systems such as the European Jupiter Exascale-Supercomputer, as well as new projects in the UK – Dawn and ISAMBARD-AI, promising impressive performance metrics. The competition in the supercomputing sector remains intense, highlighting the growing trend towards exascale computations.
In May, Spinncloud announced the commercial launch of Spinnaker2, a hybrid system for high-performance computing based on AI, developed by Steve Furber, one of the original creators of the ARM processor. The Spinnaker2 system, inspired by the principles of the human brain, incorporates numerous low-power processors for efficient processing of artificial intelligence tasks.