AMD along with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in Livermore, California, USA and HPE has just announced El Capitan, the upcoming exascale class supercomputer at LLNL. El Capitan will be powered by the next-generation AMD EPYC CPUs, AMD Radeon Instinct GPUs, and open-source AMD ROCm heterogenous computing software.
The El Capitan system is expected to be the world’s fastest supercomputer with more than 2 exaflops of double-precision performance. El Capitan will support the National Nuclear Security Administration requirements for its primary mission of ensuring the safety, security, and reliability of the American nuclear stockpile.
The AMD based nodes will be optimized to accelerate artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) workloads to potentially enable the expanded use of AI and ML into the research, computational techniques and analysis that benefits NNSA missions.
“El Capitan will drive unprecedented advancements in HPC and AI, powered by the next-generation AMD EPYC CPUs and Radeon Instinct GPUs,” said Forrest Norrod, senior vice president and general manager, Datacenter and Embedded Systems Group, AMD.
AMD technology within El Capitan includes:
- Next-generation AMD EPYC processors, codenamed “Genoa” featuring the “Zen 4” processor core. These processors will support next-generation memory and I/O subsystems for AI and HPC workloads,
- Next-generation Radeon Instinct GPUs based on a new compute-optimized architecture for workloads including HPC and AI. These GPUs will use the next- generation high bandwidth memory and are designed for optimum deep learning performance,
- The 3rd Gen AMD Infinity Architecture, which will provide a high-bandwidth, low latency connection between the four Radeon Instinct GPUs and one AMD EPYC CPU included in each node of El Capitan. As well, the 3rd Gen AMD Infinity Architecture includes unified memory across the CPU and GPU, easing programmer access to accelerated computing,
- An enhanced version of the open-source ROCm heterogeneous programming environment, being developed to tap into the combined performance of AMD CPUs and GPUs, unlocking maximum performance.
Ram found his love and appreciation for writing in 2015 having started in the gaming and esports sphere for GG Network. He would then transition to focus more on the world of tech which has also began his journey into learning more about this world. That said though, he still has the mentality of "as long as it works" for his personal gadgets.
