The Department of Energy selected a team of Intel (Nasdaq: INTC) and Cray (Nasdaq: CRAY) to build and deliver a supercomputing system to DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago by 2021 under a contract worth more than $500M.DOE said Monday the Aurora machine is designed to integrate exaFLOP computational capacity and artificial intelligence for advance scientific research and discovery efforts.
The system will use Cray’s Slingshot interconnect and more than 200 Shasta HPC cabinets as well as Intel’s Xeon Scalable processor, Xe compute architecture and One API software.
“The convergence of AI and high-performance computing is an enormous opportunity to address some of the world’s biggest challenges and an important catalyst for economic opportunity,†said Intel CEO Bob Swan.
Aurora is intended to offer researchers the ability to create extreme-scale cosmological simulations and discover materials for the creation of organic solar cells.
Energy Secretary Rick Perry said the supercomputer also has the potential to aid in cancer research, climate modeling and healthcare for veterans.
