Argonne National Laboratory has made its newest supercomputer, Polaris, available for scientific research. The system, which ranked 14th on the most recent Top500 list, is serving as a testbed for the exascale Aurora system slated for delivery in the coming months.

The HPE-built Polaris system (pictured in the header) consists of 560 nodes, each equipped with an AMD Epyc “Milan” CPU, quadruple Nvidia A100 GPUs (40GB variant) and 512GB of DDR4 memory. These nodes are networked with HPE Slingshot 10 (to be upgraded to Slingshot 11 in the fall) and are connected to Argonne’s dual 100PB Lustre filesystems, Grand and Eagle. The Top500 implementation delivers 25.81 Linpack petaflops (out of a theoretical 34.16 petaflops), compared to the 6.2 Linpack petaflops delivered by Argonne’s second-latest major system, Theta.

“Polaris is around four times faster than our Theta supercomputer, making it Argonne’s most powerful computer to date,” said Michael Papka, director of the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF). “The system brings advanced capabilities that will allow our user community to carry out simulation, data analysis, and AI tasks at a scale and speed that has not been possible with our previous systems.”

Now that the system has launched, it’s hitting the ground running. “We have a very diverse set of projects lined up to use Polaris,” said Katherine Riley, director of science for ALCF. “Some of the initial ECP [Exascale Computing Project] and ESP [Aurora Early Science Program] research campaigns include using AI to accelerate cancer research, performing massive cosmological simulations to advance our understanding of the universe, and modeling turbulent flows to inform the design of more efficient aircraft.”

The ECP and ESP work, of course, speaks to the system’s role as a herald for Aurora, the HPE-built, Intel-powered exascale system that was once slated to be the first U.S. exascale system before it was hit with hardware delays that pushed it past the now-launched Frontier exascale supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Installation on Aurora began in the spring and it appears to be on target for delivery in late 2022 to early 2023.

Beyond Aurora, Polaris will serve Argonne’s internal needs, such as use cases serving high-powered tools like the Advanced Photon Source (APS) X-ray facility. “Experimental facilities need powerful computing resources to keep pace with the increasingly large amounts of scientific data they are producing,” Papka said. “By closely integrating ALCF supercomputers with the APS, CNM, and other experimental facilities, we can help speed data analysis and provide insights that allow researchers to steer their experiments in real time.”

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