The first exascale supercomputer uses the intel xe graphics architecture

Intel and the United States Department of Energy (DOE) today announced the Aurora supercomputer, where the Intel Xe graphics architecture will be a major player.

Aurora is an exascale supercomputer with Intel Xe graphics

Aurora is the first exascale supercomputer and will be delivered to the Argonne National Laboratory in 2021. Surprisingly, the announcement has exposed the implementation of Intel Xe, a graphics architecture that Intel has not yet officially released.

Alongside this new graphics architecture, Optane DIMMs and a future generation of Xeon processors are mentioned .

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Intel and its partner Cray will build the system, which can perform unmatched quintillion per second (sustained) operations. The Aurora supercomputer is estimated to be a million times faster than today's high-end desktops. It would also be significantly faster than other supercomputers, which are in the ~ 400 petaFLOPS range of performance.

The DOE has yet to release power consumption statistics, but we do know that Intel and Cray are building the system under a $ 500 million contract, of which $ 146 million goes to Cray.

The new system is made up of 200 Shasta Cray systems and its innovative “Slingshot” mesh fabric. This platform, which will also power the Perlmutter supercomputer, may include a wide range of CPUs, including the future EPYC 'Milan' variant, but the Aurora system includes next-generation Intel Xeon CPUs not yet revealed.

The system takes advantage of Intel's Xe graphics architecture, and in its announcement, the company said Xe will be used primarily for AI (Deep Learning) functions.

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