Aurora (supercomputer)

Aurora is a planned supercomputer to be completed in 2021. It will be the United States' second exascale computer. It is sponsored by the United States Department of Energy (DOE) and designed by Intel and Cray for the Argonne National Laboratory. It will have ≈1 exaFLOPS in computing power which is equal to a quintillion (260 or 1018) calculations per second and will have an expected cost of US$500 million. It will follow Frontier, which is now expected to be the United States' first exascale computer and is also planned for 2021.
History.
Aurora was first announced in 2015 and to be finished in 2018. It was expected to have a speed of 180 petaFLOPS which would be around the speed of Summit. Aurora was meant to be the most powerful supercomputer at the time of its launch and to be built by Cray with Intel processors. Later, in 2017, Intel announced that Aurora would be delayed to 2021 but scaled up to 1 exaFLOP. In October 2020, DOE said that Aurora would be delayed again for a further 6 months and would no longer be the first exascale computer in the US.
Scientific research.
Planned functions include research on low carbon technologies, subatomic particles, cancer and cosmology. It will also develop new materials that will be useful for batteries and more efficient solar cells. It is to be available to the general scientific community.
Architecture.
Aurora will have over nine thousand nodes, with each node being composed of two Intel Xeon Sapphire Rapids processors, six Xe GPU's and a unified memory architecture which will make a single node have a maximum computing power of 130 teraFLOPS. It will have around 10 petabytes of memory, 230 PB of storage and it will consume ≤60 MW.