AMD Instinct MI300 APU to Power El Capitan Exascale Supercomputer

The Exascale supercomputing race is now well underway, as the US-based Frontier supercomputer got delivered, and now we wait to see the remaining systems join the race. Today, during 79th HPC User Forum at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Terri Quinn at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) delivered a few insights into what El Capitan exascale machine will look like. And it seems like the new powerhouse will be based on AMD’s Instinct MI300 APU. LLNL targets peak perfformance of over two ExaFLOPs and a sustained performance of more than one ExaFLOP, under 40 MegaWatts of power. This should require a very dense and efficient computing solution, just like the MI300 APU is.

As a reminder, the AMD Instinct MI300 is an APU that combines Zen4 x86-64 CPU cores, CDNA3 compute-oriented graphics, large cache structures, and HBM memory used as DRAM on a single package. This is achieved using a multi-chip module design with 2.5D and 3D chiplet integration using Infinity archutecture. The system will essentially utilize thousands of these APUs to become one large Linux cluster. It is slated for installation in 2023, with an operating lifespan from 2024 to 2030.