HPE Delivers World’s Largest Arm Supercomputer

Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced collaboration with Sandia National Laboratories and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to deliver the world’s largest Arm supercomputer. As part of the Vanguard program, Astra, the new Arm-based system, will be used by the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to run advanced modeling and simulation workloads for addressing areas such as national security, energy and science.

As a strong contender in a race for the next leap in supercomputing with an exascale-class system, the U.S. Department of Energy has moved up its timeline to deliver the first exascale system by 2021. It is investing in diverse architectures to support necessary performance, memory and scalable capabilities to drive engineering to the next great frontier in computing.

By introducing new processors like Arm to the HPC ecosystem, which has been historically dominated by x86-based technologies, HPE is building a diverse network to offer more competitive options to power next-generation supercomputers while accelerating the path to exascale. The company is also delivering memory-centric designs to support rapidly growing data-intensive HPC workloads while enabling greater density with more performance-packed servers by bringing robust, Arm-based HPC technologies to power the Astra supercomputer and future systems.

With Astra, a major stepping stone in their path to exascale, HPE is delivering over 2.3 theoretical peak petaflops of performance, 33% better memory performance than traditional market offerings, and greater system density. Astra will be deployed at Sandia National Laboratories and will run on the HPE Apollo 70. This purpose-built HPC platform is based on the Cavium ThunderX2 Arm processor. Astra is comprised of over 145,000 cores in 2,592 dual-processor servers and offers greater density with four compute nodes in a 2U form factor.