AMD's upcoming Instinct MI300 APUs with next-gen CDNA 3 GPU & Zen 4 CPUs cores will power the El Capitan Supercomputer.
El Capitan Supercomputer With AMD's Instinct MI300 APUs (Zen 4 CPU & CDNA 3 GPU) To Feature Up To 2 Exaflops of Double Precision Compute Horsepower
According to HPC Wire, during the 79th HPC User Forum at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's (LLNL) Deputy Associate Director of High-Performance Computing, Terri Quinn, revealed that the El Capitan Supercomputer which will be deployed in late 2023, will make use of AMD's next-gen Instinct MI300 APUs.
The El Capitan Supercomputer will make use of several nodes, each equipped with several Instinct MI300 APU accelerators which feature a socketed design and can be accommodated by AMD's SP5 (LGA 6096) socket. The system is said to offer 10x higher performance than the Sierra which rocks IBM's Power9 CPUs and NVIDIA's Volta GPUs and has been operational since 2018. In theoretical FP64 (double precision) compute, the system is expected to deliver a mind-boggling two Exaflops worth of horsepower and will do so under 40MW.
“It’s the first time we’ve publicly stated this,” said Quinn, associate director for HPC at LLNL. “I cut these words out of [AMD’s] investors document and that’s what it says: it’s a 3D chiplet design with AMD CDNA3 GPUs, Zen 4 CPUs, cache memory and HBM chiplets.”
“I can’t give you all the specs, but [El Capitan] is at least 10× greater than Sierra performance on average figures of merit,” said Quinn. “Theoretical peak is two double-precision exaflops, [and we’ll] keep it under 40 megawatts—same reason as Oak Ridge, the operating cost.”
El Capitan will be designed by HPE and feature Slingshot-11 interconnects to link each HPE Cray XE rack together. The AMD Instinct MI300 will pave the way for future Exascale class APUs. During the AMD Financial Day 2022, the company confirmed that the MI300 will be a multi-chip and a multi-IP Instinct accelerator which not only features the next-gen CDNA 3 GPU cores but is also equipped with the next-generation Zen 4 CPU cores.
To enable greater than 2 exaflops of double precision processing power, the U.S. Department of Energy, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and HPE have teamed up with AMD to design El Capitan, expected to be the world’s fastest supercomputer with delivery anticipated in early 2023. El Capitan will leverage next generation products that incorporate improvements from the custom processor design in Frontier.
- Next generation AMD EPYC processors, codenamed “Genoa”, will feature the “Zen 4” processor core to support next generation memory and I/O sub systems for AI and HPC workloads
- Next generation AMD Instinct GPUs based on new compute-optimized architecture for HPC and AI workloads will use next generation high bandwidth memory for optimum deep learning performance
This design will excel at AI and machine-learning data analysis to create models that are faster, more accurate, and capable of quantifying the uncertainty of their predictions.
AMD will be utilizing the 5nm process node for its Instinct MI300 'CDNA 3' GPUs. The chip will be outfitted with the next generation of Infinity Cache and feature the 4th Gen Infinity architecture which enables CXL 3.0 ecosystem support. The Instinct MI300 accelerator will rock a unified memory APU architecture and new Math Formats, allowing for a 5x performance per watt uplift over CDNA 2 which is massive. AMD is also projecting over 8x the AI performance versus the CDNA 2-based Instinct MI250X accelerators. The CDNA 3 GPU's UMAA will connect the CPU and GPU to a unified HBM memory package, eliminating redundant memory copies while delivering low TCO.
AMD's Instinct MI300 APU accelerators are expected to be available by end of 2023 which is the same time as the deployment of the El Capitan supercomputer mentioned above.
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