Argonne’s New Sunspot Testbed Provides On-ramp for Aurora Exascale Supercomputer

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The Sunspot testbed for Aurora is comprised of two racks of 128 compute blades, which are the engines of a supercomputer. Aurora will have over 10,000 blades when fully constructed (image by Argonne National Laboratory).
The Sunspot testbed for Aurora is comprised of two racks of 128 compute blades, which are the engines of a supercomputer. Aurora will have over 10,000 blades when fully constructed (image by Argonne National Laboratory).

May 8, 2023 | Originally published by Argonne National Laboratory on April 26, 2023

Researchers preparing scientific codes and workloads to run on the Aurora exascale supercomputer at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Argonne National Laboratory now have a new resource at their disposal.

Named Sunspot, the new test and development system has the exact same architecture as Aurora, which is currently under construction at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF), a DOE Office of Science user facility. It’s an important way for researchers to get a head start on testing the powerful new system before its fully operational.