The Finnish IT Center for Science (CSC) has announced that they will build a supercomputer around 3,125 AMD 64-core Epyc Rome processors. This gives a total of 200,000 cores with a peak performance of 6.4 petaflops. The supercomputer is part of a two-stage plan.
The first phase of the plan is a BullSequana X400 Cluster filled with Intel Cascade Lake Xeon processors and Nvidia gpus. This phase would be completed in 2019. However, most attention is paid to phase two under the name BullSequana X2000 supercomputer with 3,125 AMD Epyc Rome chips on board.
Over the two phases, the new supercomputer has to generate a total of 11 petaflops of computing power. This is five times more than the current system used by the CSC. They want to use the new supercomputer for research on climate, quantum mechanics, life sciences, fusion energy and many other areas.
Earlier this year, KU Leuven started using the Genius supercomputer. It has 0.6 petaflops of computing power.
AMD Epyc Rome
Earlier in November, AMD announced that the Epyc Rome processors would be released in 2019. The chips use the Zen 2 architecture and a second generation Infinity Fabric. There is also a new chiplet ecosystem that combines one 14 nm I/O with eight 7 nm CPU chiplet modules, each containing 8 cores and 16 threads.
The Epyc rome cpus support PCI Express 4.0 and can be configured up to 4 TB of DDR4 memory per socket. AMD has not yet announced an exact launch date or price. In the meantime, it has already started to supply samples to partners to start working with.
The whole project will cost CSC about 37 million euros, including training to use the hardware. The first phase with Intel chips and Nvidia hardware is specifically intended for AI training. The second phase suddenly makes Finland an important player in the supercomputer world according to CSC. According to the current list of the fastest supercomputers in the world, this system would come in at place 17. The situation may be different in 2020 when the system is put into operation.
Recently, benchmarks were leaked that position AMD Epyc Rome directly against Intel Cascade Lake Xeon. Read all the details here.
Related: AMD shows Epyc Rome with radical design and strong performance gains
This news article was automatically translated from Dutch to give Techzine.eu a head start. All news articles after September 1, 2019 are written in native English and NOT translated. All our background stories are written in native English as well. For more information read our launch article.
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