The UK's Atomic Weapons Establishment is Building a new Supercomputer with Cray and AMD EPYC hardware

Another UK Supercomputing win for AMD

| Source: Cray Inc. Author: Mark Campbell

The UK's Atomic Weapons Establishment is Building a new Supercomputer with Cray and AMD EPYC hardware

Cray Inc has announced that they will be supplying the United Kingdom's Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) with an AMD-powered Shasta supercomputer, which will deliver roughly 7 petaflops of compute performance and play an integral role in maintaining the UK's Nuclear deterrent. The supercomputer will be called Vulcan.



The supercomputer in question will be powered by AMD EPYC 7542 processors, Cray's Slingshot interconnects and Cray's ClusterStor Lustre storage. The high-performance storage system used here will offer roughly 100 gigabytes per second of I/O performance. AMD's EPYC 7542 processors offer users 32 cores and 64 threads and support for two-socket configurations.



Below is a comment from AWE's head of HPC, Andy Herdman;





High-performance computing is a critical aspect of AWE. It underpins the vast majority of our science-based programs, and we’re continually looking for ways to enhance and support this important work. This is why we chose Shasta, for its unique and powerful features, as well as its ability to provide optimal TCO.







The use of AMD's EPYC processors is said to help reduce the total cost of ownership of the system while delivering unprecedented performance. This is thanks to the I/O capabilities of AMD's second-generation EPYC processors and the efficiency of AMD's Zen 2 architecture and 7nm manufacturing.



At this time it is unknown how many EPYC 7542 processors will be used in this system, or when the system will be delivered to AWE.



You can join the discussion on AMD's EPYC processors powering UK's AWE Vulcan supercomputer on the OC3D Forums.

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