While the other will be based on whatever AMD has available by 2025, the first will employ its new MI300.
AMD has announced “Exascale Supercomputing Is Coming to Stuttgart” and will build two computers: one that will upgrade an existing system to 39 PFLOPS and a future exascale machine similar to its current Frontier supercomputer. The two machines will be known as Hunter and Herder, with the former coming online in 2025 and the latter scheduled for a 2027 launch. The proverbial paint is still drying on AMD’s new Instinct MI300 chips, but the company has already stated that they are being used for a new supercomputer in Germany.
The University of Stuttgart, in collaboration with Hewlett Packard Enterprise, has signed a new contract that will see the latter upgrade its current Hawk supercomputer and install a second system at the HLRS, a research institute and supercomputer center in Stuttgart. The big news here is that this is the first supercomputer contract for AMD’s all-new MI300A chip, which combines a CPU, GPU, and high-bandwidth memory onto a single package. These data center “APUs” will be installed into Hawk, the center’s current flagship supercomputer, which stands at 26 PFLOPS.Although it is not ancient nor slow—it debuted at #16 on the Top500 list in 2020—we completely appreciate the need to upgrade a PC, so this is by no means a negative statement.
Updating the system to AMD’s new MI300A will boost its output to 39 PFLOPS while also increasing efficiency by 80% thanks to the APU’s design and integrated memory. The center’s Hawk system, which presently uses AMD Epyc “Rome” CPUs and Nvidia A100 GPUs, makes it cutting-edge for 2020. The new version, Hunter, will be based on the HPE Cray EX4000 supercomputer and will have 136 nodes. The organization says this new version is a giant leap for the center, as it marks the beginning of a transition period away from primarily relying on CPUs to more energy-efficient GPUs.
Hunter will not only be operational by 2025, but it will also use AMD accelerators to build a new Exascale system called Herder; the hardware for this system will be decided in 2025, so it is probably whatever the next MI300 iteration is, as it will not be powered on until 2027. AMD also powers Frontier, the world’s only Exascale supercomputer, which remains at the top of the podium at Top500.org despite making its debut in June of 2022.
This mega system, in contrast to Hawk and Hunter, will use GPUs as its major compute source, which we predict will become the standard in 2027. The center attributes this change to the advantages of GPUs’ massively parallel design over CPUs.