Few people will be able to actually see the inside of a supercomputer, but a virtual tour is possible. Nvidia previously opened the doors to Eos, one of the world's fastest supercomputers, and now the Department of Energy's Argon National Laboratory has prepared a short 5-minute video that walks viewers through Aurora, its exascale supercomputer.
Aurora is already one of the fastest supercomputers in the world. HPC Cable ranked it No. 2 on its Top 500 list in November 2023. But that ranking was achieved with only “half of Aurora running the HPL benchmark.”
When fully operational, Aurora will have a peak performance of approximately two exaflops and will be tasked with solving important problems related to climate change, human health and materials science. As Argon says, thanks to supercomputers like Aurora, “problems that once took years to solve now only take days.”
44,000 gallons of water cooling
As the video shows, Aurora is so large that a special state-of-the-art building had to be built just to house it. The video also covers Aurora's stats and as expected, they are amazing.
“There are 300 kilometers of optical cabling, so they would reach from Chicago to St. Louis. It covers 10,000 square feet, two NBA basketball courts. And Aurora weighs about 600 tons. It weighs as much as the largest passenger plane in the world. “It has 160 racks, 8 feet high and arranged in eight rows.”
Each Aurora rack has 64 blades, also called nodes, and each of them has six GPUs, two CPUs, and RAM. Obviously, Aurora generates a lot of heat, so there are 44,000 gallons of water flowing through pipes and cooling the supercomputer.
You can take the tour of Aurora in the video below.
