The UK government announced today that it has awarded the contract for the country's next generation national supercomputer to Cray, a supercomputing specialist subsidiary of HP. The new supercomputer, dubbed ARCHER2, will be deployed at the University of Edinburgh and powered by AMD's EPYC Rome enterprise CPUs.

Needless to say, ARCHER2 represents a significant step forwards in capability for the UK science community, with the system expected to sit among the fastest fully general purpose (CPU only) systems when it comes into service in May 2020.

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ARCHER2 will deliver over 11X the computational throughput of its predecessor ARCHER. The new supercomputer features :

28 PFLOP/s peak performance

5,848 compute nodes, each with dual AMD Rome 64 core CPUs at 2.2GHz, for 748,544 cores in total and 1.57 PBytes of total system memory

23x Shasta Mountain direct liquid cooled cabinets

14.5 PBytes of Lustre work storage in 4 file systems

1.1 PByte all-flash Lustre BurstBuffer file system

1+1 PByte home file system in Disaster Recovery configuration using NetApp FAS8200

Cray next-generation Slingshot 100Gbps network in a diameter-three dragonfly topology, consisting of 46 compute groups, 1 I/O group and 1 Service group

Shasta River racks for management and post processing

Test and Development System (TDS) platform, to be installed in advance

Collaboration platform with 4 x compute nodes attached to 16 x Next Generation AMD GPUs

Software wise ARCHER2 will feature the Cray Programming Environment with specific optimizing compilers and libraries for AMD's EPYC Rome. The system will rely on Cray's Linux Environment, also optimized specifically for AMD's Rome.

When ARCHER2 goes into operation next year it is expected to be the 5th most powerful supercomputer in the world and the most powerful CPU-only supercomputer in the world.