A brand-new class of system

Each machine generation provides a fresh challenge to U.S. computer manufacturers—from the racks to the processors to the networking to the I/O system. Similarly, fulfilling the science potential of each new computing architecture requires significant changes to today’s software. The initiative is, and will continue to be, guided by pioneering visionaries in the mathematics and computational science community, stewarded by the DOE’s Office of Science, and operated at the cutting edge.

But while people have been using supercomputers to solve big problems for years, the capabilities of the machines that will soon begin rolling out in national labs around the country will be brand new.

Researchers will be able to run a greater diversity of workloads, including machine learning and data intensive tasks, in addition to traditional simulations. Providing the data science software “stack”—the high-level programming languages, frameworks, and I/O middleware that are conventional toolkits—at exascale, is a major effort in deploying Aurora.





Revolutionary architecture

Aurora will feature several technological innovations, including a revolutionary I/O system—the Distributed Asynchronous Object Store (DAOS)—to support new types of workloads. Aurora will be built on a future generation of Intel® Xeon® Scalable processor accelerated by Intel’s Xe compute architecture. Cray Slingshot™ fabric and Shasta™ platform will form the backbone of the system.Programming techniques already in use on current systems will apply directly to Aurora. The system will be highly optimized across multiple dimensions that are key to success in simulation, data, and learning applications: