Intel will build Aurora, the world’s first exascale supercomputer by 2021

Intel, together with the United States Department of Energy (DOE) will deliver the world’s first exascale supercomputer by 2021. Named “Aurora”, the supercomputer is capable of a “quintillion” floating point computations per second, or an exaFLOP of performance, as well as HPC and AI capabilities. It will give scientists and researchers access to exascale computing resources to address their research topics and issues.

According to Intel, Aurora will be powered by the company’s future Xeon Scalable CPUs, Intel Xe compute architecture and Optane DC memory. This race for the world’s first exascale supercomputer will also include China, with news of their first prototype exascale computer, the Tianhe-3, and Japan, who intends to build an ARM-based exascale supercomputer named Post-K.

In 2015, then US President Barack Obama signed an executive order for the creation of a National Strategic Computer Initiative (NSCI), with the hopes to build the world's first exascale supercomputer.

Source: Intel (1), (2), Data Centre Dynamics, Xinhuanet News Agency via Top500.org

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