[HPC Wire] Cray Shasta w/AMD EPYC Lands DOE NERSC-9 Contract

[Despoiler]

In tandem with Cray’s Shasta disclosures, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is announcing that NERSC, the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, has chosen a Cray Shasta supercomputer for its NERSC-9 system, slated for delivery in late 2020. Named “Perlmutter” (after Nobel Prize winner Saul Perlmutter) the system will feature AMD Epyc processors and Nvidia GPUs offering a combined peak performance of ~100 petaflops and a sustained application performance equivalent to about 3X that of the Cray Cori (NERSC-8) supercomputer. The new contract, which includes a Cray Clusterstor storage system, is worth a reported $146 million, one of the largest in Cray’s history. (We’ll be reporting additional details of the NERSC-9 system soon.)

https://www.hpcwire.com/2018/10/30/cray-unveils-shasta-lands-nersc-9-contract/

Huge win for AMD.

 

[Atari2600]

Wonder is that a result of all those PCIe lanes, or EYPCs performance in itself, or a mix...

 

[DrMrLordX]

Interesting that they went EPYC + Nvidia instead of POWER + Nvidia (Summit).

It'll be a truly huge win for AMD when they can convince buyers to use Vega20 instead of NV cards . . . might be a software stack-based decision though (CUDA vs OpenCL)

 

[csbin]

http://www.nersc.gov/systems/perlmutter/

 

[csbin]

https://www.energy.gov/articles/doe...omputer-lawrence-berkeley-national-laboratory

The new supercomputer will be a heterogeneous system comprising both CPU-only and GPU-accelerated cabinets. It will include a number of innovations designed to meet the diverse computational and data analysis needs of NERSC’s user base and speed their scientific productivity. That includes a new Cray system interconnect, code-named Slingshot, that is designed for data-centric computing; as well as NVIDIA GPUs with new Tensor Core technology, direct liquid cooling, and an all-flash scratch filesystem which will move data at a rate of more than 4 terabytes/sec.

 

[csbin]

https://www.top500.org/news/crays-next-generation-supercomputer-headed-to-berkeley-lab-in-2020/


According to Nick Wright, the lead for NERSC’s Advanced Technology Group, the system will be a mix of CPU-only nodes and GPU-accelerated nodes, with more of the former than the latter. The GPUs will be sourced from NVIDIA, and will most like be the company’s next-generation Tesla offering; AMD will be providing the CPUs, presumably based on its third-generation EPYC processors (codenamed Milan). The CPU-only nodes will be dual-socket servers, while the NVIDIA-accelerated nodes will have a single CPU and four GPUs. The system will be hooked together with Cray’s Slingshot interconnect, a technology the company is introducing in conjunction with its Shasta platform.

 

[wahdangun]

So zen2+ cpu?

 

[Ajay]

So zen2+ cpu?

Milan is Zen3.

 

[Evleos]

Milan is Zen3.

And Zen 3 is supposed to be an evolution over Zen 2, not the "revolution" that is Zen 2.

 

[Despoiler]

More on Cray's Slingshot interconnect.

https://www.cray.com/blog/meet-slin...ct-for-the-next-generation-of-supercomputers/