The United Kingdom Research and Innovation organization announced this week that Cray will deliver its new supercomputer. The Archer 2 runs on, and wait for it ... 11696 Epyc Rome CPUs for a total of 748,544 cores at 2.2 GHz.
The Archer 2 supercomputer contains 5848 compute nodes , each holding two AMD Epyc CPUs with 64 cores running at 2.2 GHz. That is 748,544 cores (!). Archer 2 has a total of 1.57 petabytes of system memory, and is placed in 23 Shasta Mountain server cabinets with water cooling. The computer contains 14.5PB of storage space with the Luster file system and 1.1PB of flash memory with the Luster BurstBuffer filesystem. The supercomputer will be used by scientists for complex molecular simulations. In CP2K workloads, it should be up to 8.7 times faster than the current Archer. On 6 May next year, the organization will start a 30-day stress test to locate and resolve any problems.
ARCHER2 should be capable on average of over eleven times the science throughput of ARCHER, based on benchmarks which use five of the most heavily used codes on the current service. As with all new systems, the relative speedups over ARCHER vary by benchmark. The ARCHER2 science throughput codes used for the benchmarking evaluation are estimated to reach 8.7x for CP2K, 9.5x for OpenSBLI, 11.3x for CASTEP, 12.9x for GROMACS, and 18.0x for HadGEM3. Needless to say, ARCHER2 represents a significant step forwards in capability for the UK science community, with the system expected to sit among the fastest fully general purpose (CPU only) systems when it comes into service in May 2020.
As has been previously announced, because ARCHER2 is being installed in the same room as the current ARCHER system, there will be a period of downtime where no service will be available. Therefore, users should plan their work appropriately. ARCHER is due to end operation on 18th February 2020, and ARCHER2 will be operational from 6th May 2020. However, please note that from the 6th May, there will be a period of 30 days continuous running to stress-test the new machine and sort out any issues before full service, where access will be possible but may be limited. We will be providing information about allocations and access routes for ARCHER2 shortly.
ARCHER2 technical specifications:
- A peak performance estimated at ~ 28 PFLOP/s
- System Design:
- 5,848 compute nodes, each with dual AMD Rome 64 core CPUs at 2.2GHz, for 748,544 cores in total and 1.57 PBytes of total system memory
- 23x Shasta Mountain direct liquid cooled cabinets
- 14.5 PBytes of Lustre work storage in 4 file systems
- 1.1 PByte all-flash Lustre BurstBuffer file system
- 1+1 PByte home file system in Disaster Recovery configuration using NetApp FAS8200
- Cray next-generation Slingshot 100Gbps network in a diameter-three dragonfly topology, consisting of 46 compute groups, 1 I/O group and 1 Service group
- Shasta River racks for management and post processing
- Test and Development System (TDS) platform, to be installed in advance
- Collaboration platform with 4 x compute nodes attached to 16 x Next Generation AMD GPUs
- Software stack:
- Cray Programming Environment including optimizing compilers and libraries for the AMD Rome CPU
- Cray Linux Environment optimized for the AMD CPU blade based on SLES 15
- Shasta Software Stack
- SLURM work load manager
- CrayPat as profiler
- GDB4HPC as debugger
