A new 44-petaflops (theoretical peak) supercomputer is under construction at the Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory. Called Polaris, this new supercomputing star has been selected to light the way to exascale and to Aurora, the exascale-class Intel-HPE system that’s had its delivery pushed to next year (2022).

“We looked at many possible solutions with Aurora in the back of our mind,” said Kumaran of the technology selection process. “We wanted something with multi-GPU node support. And we wanted something that would support some of the key programming models on Aurora, which is MPI, OpenMP, and also SYCL in DPC++ (the SYCL 2020 variant from Intel). We wanted these programming models supported, and Polaris offered that solution.