H.P.E. has signed two new contracts related to high performance computing, involving the development of two new supercomputers. one in japan, Tsubame 4.0and another in the United Kingdom, Isambard 3.
The project in which HPE will participate in Japan aims to develop a team for the Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tsubame 4.0. This will be used to facilitate scientific discoveries supported by Artificial Intelligence, and will be fully operational in the first of 2024. It will be deployed in facilities that have just been completed in the Suzukakedai campus of Tokyo Institute of Technology.
The mission of this supercomputer will be to manage the modeling and simulation of workloads for scientific research projects. Above all, related to medicine, materials science and the study of climate and its variations.
This system will feature 240 nodes of HPE’s Cray XD65000 systems, which are actually a rebrand of the Apollo 6500 systems the company announced in 2022. Each node has a pair of 4th-generation AMD Epyc processors, with 768GB of memory. and four of Nvidia’s H100 Tensor Core GPUs. In addition, it will use Nvidia’s Quantum-2 InfiniBand kit to achieve 400 Gbps connectivity between nodes.
If all goes according to plan, this configuration of Tsubame 4.0 will achieve a peak performance of 66.8 petaflops at 64-bit double precision. According to HPE, this means that Tsubame 4.0 will have 20 times more computing performance than its predecessor, Tsubame 3.0. Its configuration will be much the same as the Tsubame system currently at the Tokyo Tech facility, with the goal that existing software assets can continue to be used on the new equipment, along with new code for computer science and technology.
Meanwhile, the system that HPE will build, along with other companies such as Nvidia, for the UK, will be based on Nvidia’s Grace processors. It will be located in facilities prepared for the supercomputer, Isambard 3, at the Bristol&Bath Science Park. It is also expected to come online in the spring of 2024.
The entity in charge of directing the project is the University of Bristol, and the universities of Bath, Cardiff and Exeter also participate as part of the GW4 Alliance research consortium. It is the third of the Isambard supercomputers, all based on ARM chips. It will have 384 Grace chips, and each of them will have. 144 cores. In total, Isambard 3 will have 55,396 cores, which are expected to deliver 64-bit floating-point double-precision performance of 2.7 petaflops. This, with a consumption of 270 kilowatts of power.
Their mission will be to participate in research projects on Artificial Intelligence, life sciences, medicine, astrophysics and biotechnology. In addition, you will also be able to create detailed models of complex structures, such as wind farms and nuclear fusion reactors. As a result, it will help researchers to work on progress towards clean energy technologies.
Isambard 3 will offer a Multi-Architecture Comparison System (MACS), which will integrate between two and four nodes from “all the most relevant CPU and GPU architectures” that are released during the system’s four-year life expectancy.
