7nm amd epyc will be used in a finnish supercomputer with 200,000 cores

Over the next year and a half, the Finnish IT Center for Science (CSC) will purchase a new two-phase supercomputer. The first phase consists of the Atos air-cooled BullSequana X400 cluster that it uses with Intel Cascade Lake Xeon processors. In the second phase with the BullSequana XH2000 cluster, the CSC will use the 7nm EPYC 'Rome' chips, which together will add up to 200, 000 cores.

Finnish supercomputer equals 3, 125 7nm EPYC processors for a total of 200, 000 cores

The first stage of this super-computer would start in the summer of 2019 with a first BullSequana X400 cluster using chips from Intel (Cascade Lake) together with Mellanox HDR InfiniBand for a theoretical performance of 2 petaflops. Meanwhile, system memory per node will range from 96GB to 1.5TB, and the entire system will receive a 4.9 PB Luster parallel file system also from DDN. Additionally, a separate Phase One partition will be used for AI research and will feature 320 NVIDIA V100 NVLinked GPUs configured on 4 GPU nodes. Peak performance is expected to reach 2.5 petaflops.

Where things get interesting is in phase two, which is slated to complete in spring 2020. Atos will build a BullSequana XH2000 supercomputer with liquid cooling and HDR connection that will be configured with 200, 000 AMD EPYC “Rome” CPU cores, that translates to 3, 125 64-core AMD EPYC processors.

Of course, all of that x86 muscle will require a large amount of system memory and each node will be equipped with 256GB of volatile memory. The storage will consist of an 8 PB Luster parallel file system that will be provided by DDN. In general, phase two will increase computability by 6.4 petaflops (peak). With deals like this already signed, it seems AMD's next-generation EPYC processors are shaping up very well considering that Intel has had this monopolized market for almost a decade.

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