Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has announced its collaboration with Sandia National Laboratories and the US Department of Energy (DOE) to deliver the world’s largest Arm supercomputer. As part of the Vanguard project, Astra, the new Arm-based system, will be used by the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to run advanced modelling and simulation workloads for addressing areas such as national security, energy and science.
In today’s data-intensive environment, there is an increasing demand for higher compute performance as organisations conduct research-intensive tasks that require processing and analysing large data sets to address challenges across medicine, climate change, space, and oil and gas exploration.
‘By introducing Arm processors with the HPE Apollo 70, a purpose-built HPC architecture, we are bringing powerful elements, like optimal memory performance and greater density, to supercomputers that existing technologies in the market cannot match,’ said Mike Vildibill, vice president, Advanced Technology Group, HPE. ‘Sandia National Laboratories has been an active partner in leveraging our Arm-based platform since its early design, and featuring it in the deployment of the world’s largest Arm-based supercomputer, is a strategic investment for the DOE and an industry as a whole as we race toward achieving exascale computing.’
Introducing new processors like Arm to the HPC ecosystem, which has been historically dominated by x86-based technologies, HPE is building a diverse network to offer more competitive options to power next-generation supercomputers while accelerating the path to exascale. HPE is also delivering memory-centric designs to support rapidly growing data-intensive HPC workloads while enabling greater density with more performance-packed servers by bringing robust, Arm-based HPC technologies to power the Astra supercomputer and future systems.
With Astra, a major stepping stone in HPE’s path to exascale, HPE is delivering over 2.3 theoretical peak petaflops of performance, 33 per cent better memory performance than traditional market offerings, and greater system density. The NNSA, an agency within the DOE that is responsible for the management and security of the nation’s nuclear weapons, nuclear non-proliferation, and naval reactor programs, will advance modelling and simulation tools to improve analysis on data-intensive science experiments.
‘We are committed to fielding the most advanced technologies as part of the Vanguard program,’ said James Laros, Vanguard project lead at Sandia National Laboratories. ‘We are collaborating with HPE to advance the Arm ecosystem and prove the viability of this architecture to support our national security mission.’
