We do not think Lawrence Livermore would have used an incorrect block diagram a year ago to throw us all off of the scent that it was using a single CPU-GPU package. And it looks like sometime within the past year, as AMD was putting together its hybrid CPU-GPU device that Lawrence Livermore decided that was a better approach. That sure looks like a Frontier node, architecturally. It sure wasn’t obvious from this diagram of the El Capitan nodes using high-speed, PC-Express switched high speed storage system called Rabbit, which we wrote about in March 2021: And while AMD was saying more than two years ago that El Capitan was going to be based on standard “Genoa” Epyc 7004 parts and standard “Radeon Instinct” GPU parts – AMD had not yet dropped the “Radeon” brand from its datacenter motors when it was speaking – it was not at all obvious, even weeks ago, that El Capitan would not be using discrete Epyc and Instinct chips to do its work. This stood somewhat in contrast to its peer HPC center, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, whose “Frontier” exascale supercomputer has custom “Trento” Epyc 7003 processors with Zen 3 cores and the Infinity Fabric 3.0 interconnect, which provides coherent memory between the Trento CPUs and the “Aldebaran” Instinct MI250X GPU accelerators.īeing installed later means that Lawrence Livermore can intersect the AMD compute roadmaps further into the future, and get more powerful compute engines to reach its “greater than 2 exaflops” peak performance target. In March 2020, when Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory announced the exascale “El Capitan” supercomputer contract had been awarded to system builder Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which was also kicking in its “Rosetta” Slingshot 11 interconnect and which was tapping future CPU and GPU compute engines from AMD, the HPC center was very clear that it would be using off-the-shelf, commodity parts from AMD, not custom compute engines.
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