August 25, 2021
The United States Department of Energy is close to finalizing an agreement to buy a supercomputer called Polaris, powered by chips from Nvidia Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc.
According to Reuters, Polaris will not replace the Intel-based Aurora machine, which is intended for the Argonne National Lab near Chicago, but will serve as a test machine for Argonne to prepare its software for the Intel machine.
The latest move by the United States Department of Energy was necessary because of the delay in the Intel-powered Aurora supercomputer, which suffered a blow due to production problems related to Intel’s Sapphire Rapids server chips.
The latest development means that while Intel and its partners have concluded a $500 million deal to supply a computer capable of performing 1 quintillion calculations per second, the first to be able to perform such a task will no longer be Intel’s Aurora, but a different machine in a different lab.
While the Polaris computer will be able to perform some exaflop calculations, it will do so at a slower speed and it will not be as powerful as the Intel machine.
For more information, read the original story in Reuters.
