A trillion is a billion billion, or 18 digits. By the time you read this sentence, this supercomputer will be capable of performing more than two trillion operations, a record. An invaluable tool for research according to the scientists who designed it.
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It should be fully operational next year. Construction continues near Chicago. Aurora will be installed at the Department of Energy’s Argonne Research Laboratory, which is affiliated with the University of Chicago, but is built by Intel and Hewlett-Packard, two computer giants.
It is therefore a supercomputer capable of carrying out two trillion operations in one second. This requires space, the equivalent of two tennis courts for a weight of 600 tonnes. It is equipped with 60,000 graphics processors, which is 20,000 more than any other supercomputer. The project took more than eight years to complete.
To quote the University of Chicago in its presentation of the project, these supercomputers have inestimable value for scientists. All large-scale climate simulations are done by these computers. The Fast Company site lists some of the areas where Aurora could help research: better prepare for fire and flood risks or map the connections of the human brain. Even for a supercomputer like Aurora, this card will take months, if not years.
The system also makes it possible to design more powerful and durable batteries, analyze data from an X-ray machine or even develop new drugs by analyzing millions of molecules. And then data analysis, obviously, is at the heart of research on artificial intelligence.
Aurora is not the only supercomputer on the planet
It is not even the most powerful yet but even unfinished, it is already second in the Top500 supercomputers established twice a year since 1993. Ranking without China which does not communicate figures. The first supercomputer of the moment is Frontier, which only performs a trillion operations per second. Ultimately, Aurora will have 70% more memory than Frontier.
Other American supercomputers, El Capitan in California and Eagle developed by Microsoft, could in turn overtake Aurora. Because it all happens very quickly. Summit, the most powerful supercomputer of 2020, is now seventh. Above all, a laptop today has more or less the power of a supercomputer 30 years ago.