Woah two Exaflops ! that’s 2 thousand petaflops or 2 quintillion (1018) double precision floating point operations per second.
Taken from Tom’s Hardware … AMD scored another big win today with the announcement that the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has selected its next-next-gen EPYC Genoa processors with the Zen 4 architecture and Radeon GPUs to power the $600 million EL Capitan, a two-exaflop system that will be faster than the top 200 supercomputers in service today, combined.
AMD beat out both Intel and Nvidia for the contract, making this AMD’s second win for an exascale system with the DOE (details on Frontier here). Meanwhile, Intel previously won the contract for the DOE’s third (and only remaining) exascale supercomputer, Aurora.
Many analysts had contended that the DOE would offer the El Capitan contract to Nvidia, so today’s announcement marks another loss for Nvidia, which currently isn’t participating in any known exascale-class supercomputer project. That’s particularly interesting because Nvidia GPUs currently dominate the Top 500 supercomputers and are the leading solution for GPU-accelerated compute in the data center.
The DOE originally announced El Capitan in August 2019, but at the time the agency hadn’t come to a final decision on either the CPUs or GPUs that would power what will soon be the world’s fastest supercomputer. That’s because the agency engaged in a late-binding contract process to suss out which vendor could provide the best solution for a system that would be deployed in late 2022 and operational in 2023, meaning it evaluated future technology from multiple vendors.
Source: Tom’s Hardware
