The American supercomputer Aurora finally makes its debut in the top 500 after a two-year delay, but cannot surpass or even keep up with Frontier. The promised exascale capacity has not been achieved.

The new American supercomputer Aurora takes second place in the new Top 500. The Top 500 list is published twice a year and shows which HPC systems are the fastest in the world. The leader remains unchanged: the American Frontier supercomputer, which is also American, is the fastest.

The fact that Aurora is in second place is a huge disappointment. The system was originally supposed to go online in 2021, but implementation was significantly delayed. The version that is now in the top 500 is not yet the final machine. Aurora is currently only half online.

Although the overall computing power is sufficient for second place at the top, the promised exascale performance has not yet been achieved. The benchmarks measure 585.34 petaflops. Frontier achieves 1,194 exaflops.

Intel vs AMD

Both systems are built by HPE, but their hardware is very different. Frontier relies on AMD Epyc CPUs paired with AMD’s Instinct MI250X accelerators. For Aurora, HPE is working with Intel, but it appears to be much more difficult to get the Intel Xeon Max processors and the Intel Data Center GPU Max accelerators to work together at scale. Frontier also had some teething problems.

Patience is a virtue and ambitions for Aurora remain sky-high. If everything works in the long term, this supercomputer promises to be the most powerful in the world with an expected performance of two exaflops. The milestone is scheduled for sometime in 2024. A third system is now being built with AMD hardware: El Capitan. This must be even more powerful. The HPC race continues, although AMD can keep up with the challenge cup for a while longer thanks to Frontier.