Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory are using a test and development system to prepare scientific codes for the Aurora exascale supercomputer being developed at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility.
Sunspot is a two-rack testbed computer equipped with 128 nodes of the same technologies found in the Aurora supercomputer, ANL said Wednesday.
Susan Coghlan, ALCF project director for Aurora, said Sunspot is a miniature version of the supercomputer that enables research teams to “optimize code performance on the actual Aurora hardware.”
Tim Williams, co-manager of the ALCF’s Aurora Early Science Program, added that testbeds like Sunspot allow researchers to scale their workloads to run on larger supercomputers.
Aurora will have over 10,000 compute blades, each equipped with six Intel Data Center GPU Max Series processors and two new Intel Xeon CPU Max Series processors.
