Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) announced the next generation of supercomputer testers this week for researchers to sneak a sneak peek at and prepare for future testing.
OLCF today announced a scaled-down version of the U.S. Department of Energy's future supercomputer Frontier, called TheRusher, which uses the same architecture as Frontier, but is small, occupying only 44 square feet (1.2 square meters) of floor area, which is 1/100th of the Titan of the supercomputer that was retired in 2019.
Frontier is expected to be available by the end of 2022 and open for use in early 2023, but The Crusher is now available as an early testing machine for multi-master institutions. It is currently used by the U.S. Accelerated Application Improvement Center, the Exascale Computing Project, and the National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) and partners to develop programs for future experiments on Frontier.
Image credit/OLCF
Crusher will use HPE Cray server and HPE Slignshot interconnection technology, with a total of 192 computing nodes, divided into 2 cabinets, 128 and 64 computing nodes each. Each Crusher node contains a 64-core AMD EPYC 7A53 3rd generation EPYC CPU, 512 GB of DDR4 memory, and 4 AMD MI250X, so each Crusher has 768 AMD MI250X. According to the data, Crusher will have a double-precision floating-point operation speed of 53TFLOPS in modeling and simulation operations. Tom's Hardware reports that the peak of computing would theoretically be close to 40 PetaFLOPS. According to the ranking of the top 500 supercomputers released last year, Crusher is already equivalent to 8th.
The Frontier under construction is also powered by HPE Cray hardware, with 64 AMD EPYC Trento 7A53 CPUs and four AMD Aldebaran MI250X GPUs. According to reports, it is expected that the Frontier floating-point operation speed will be at least more than 1.5 exaflops, which will easily re-enter the position of supercomputer leader, and the current owner is Japan's Fugaku, with an operation speed of 442 petaflops.
The Next Platform reports that China is also developing 2 next-generation supercomputers, which are rumored to be up to 1.3 exaflops.