A brand-new class of system

Each machine generation provides a fresh challenge to U.S. computer manufacturers—from the racks to the processors to the networking to the I/O system. Similarly, fulfilling the science potential of each new computing architecture requires significant changes to today’s software. The initiative is, and will continue to be, guided by experts in the mathematics and computational science community, stewarded by the DOE’s Office of Science, and operated at the cutting edge.

But while people have been using supercomputers to solve big problems for years, the capabilities of exascale machines will provide new opportunities to advance science and engineering.

Researchers will be able to run a greater diversity of workloads, including machine learning and data-intensive tasks, in addition to traditional simulation and modeling campaigns. Providing the data science software “stack”—the high-level programming languages, frameworks, and I/O middleware that are conventional toolkits—at exascale, is a major effort in deploying Aurora.

Science on day one

Argonne researchers are contributing to a broad range of activities to prepare Aurora for science on day one. To ensure key software is ready to run on the exascale system, scientists and developers participating in DOE’s Exascale Computing Project (ECP) and the ALCF’s Aurora Early Science Program (ESP) continue work to port and optimize dozens of scientific computing applications. With access to the Aurora software development kit and early hardware, the teams are working to improve the performance and functionality of various codes, frameworks, and libraries using the programming models that will be supported on Aurora. In addition, training events, such as workshops, hackathons, and webinars, have been an important mechanism for providing guidance on application development and disseminating the latest details on hardware and software.

Learn best practices for porting code to Aurora

Learn how ALCF staff experts are preparing for Aurora
 

Revolutionary architecture

Aurora will feature several technological innovations, including a revolutionary I/O system—the Distributed Asynchronous Object Store (DAOS)—to support new types of workloads. Aurora will be built on a future generation of Intel Xeon Scalable processor accelerated by Intel’s Xe compute architecture. Slingshot 11 fabric and HPE Cray EX supercomputer platform will form the backbone of the system. Programming techniques already in use on current systems will apply directly to Aurora. The system will be highly optimized across multiple dimensions that are key to success in simulation, data, and learning applications.

Developer information

We are identifying ways that you can begin preparing your code for the ALCF's exascale system. Please check out the links provided on this page to get started. We’ll continue to keep update as more information can be made available to the public.

For links to early adopter information, please see alcf.anl.gov/support-center/aurora