Aurora (supercomputer)

Aurora is an exascale supercomputer that was sponsored by the United States Department of Energy (DOE) and designed by Intel and Cray for the Argonne National Laboratory. It has been the second fastest supercomputer in the world since 2023. It is expected that after optimizing its performance it will exceed 2 ExaFLOPS, making it the fastest computer ever.

The cost was estimated in 2019 to be US$500 million. Olivier Franza is the chief architect and principal investigator of this design.

History
In 2013 DOE presented their exascale vision of one exaFLOP at 20 MW by 2020. Aurora was first announced in 2015 and to be finished in 2018. It was expected to have a speed of 180 petaFLOPS which would be around the speed of Summit. Aurora was meant to be the most powerful supercomputer at the time of its launch and to be built by Cray with Intel processors. Later, in 2017, Intel announced that Aurora would be delayed to 2021 but scaled up to 1 exaFLOP. In March 2019, DOE said that it would build the first supercomputer with a performance of one exaFLOP in the United States in 2021.

In October 2020, DOE said that Aurora would be delayed again for a further six months, and would no longer be the first exascale computer in the US. In late October 2021 Intel announced that Aurora would now exceed 2 exaFLOPS in peak double-precision compute. The system was fully installed on June 22, 2023.

In May 2024, Aurora appeared at number two on the Top500 supercomputer list, with a performance of 1.012 exaFLOPS, marking the second entry of an exascale capable system on the Top500. Aurora is still expected to exceed 2 exaFLOPS of performance once the entire system has been brought online and optimizations have been made, exceeding Frontier as the #1 supercomputer on Top500, as optimizing supercomputers can lead to significant performance improvements.

Usage
Functions include research on nuclear fusion, low carbon technologies, subatomic particles, cancer and cosmology. It will also develop new materials that will be useful for batteries and more efficient solar cells. It is to be available to the general scientific community.

Architecture
Aurora has over nine thousand nodes, with each node being composed of two Intel Xeon Max processors, six Intel Max series GPUs and a unified memory architecture, providing a maximum computing power of 130 teraFLOPS per node. It has around 10 petabytes of memory and 230 petabytes of storage.

The machine is estimated to consume around 60 MW of power. For comparison, the fastest computer in the world today, Frontier uses 21 MW while Summit uses 13 MW.