While this step can be challenging for Astra’s new architecture and compilers, the real effort will likely involve a continuous cycle of performance analysis, optimization and scalability studies, which evaluate performance on larger and larger node counts to achieve the best possible performance on this architecture. The next steps include transferring mission codes to Astra from existing architectures used to support the NNSA mission. Less than a month after hardware delivery and system installation, Astra reached its first goal of running programs concurrently on thousands of nodes. “We expect to improve on these benchmark results and demonstrate the applicability of this architecture for NNSA’s mission codes at supercomputer scale.” They also position Astra as the world leader in this architecture category,” said Sandia computer architect James Laros, Astra project lead. “These preliminary results demonstrate that Arm-based processors are competitive for high-performance computing. A single Astra node is roughly one hundred times faster than a modern Arm-based cell phone, and Astra has 2,592 nodes.
The machine’s success means the supercomputing industry may have found a new potential supplier of supercomputer processors, since Arm designs are available for licensing.Īrm processors previously had been used exclusively for low-power mobile computers, including cell phones and tablets. The latter test uses computational and data access patterns that more closely match the simulation codes used by the National Nuclear Security Administration.Īstra is one of the first supercomputers to use processors based on Arm technology. (One thousand teraflops equals 1 petaflop.) The supercomputer is also ranked 36th on the High-Performance Conjugate Gradients benchmark, co-developed by Sandia and the University of Tennessee Knoxville, with a performance of 66.942 teraflops. Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.Ī petaflop is a unit of computing speed equal to one thousand million million (10 15) floating-point operations per second.Īstra, housed at Sandia National Laboratories, achieved this speed on the High-Performance Linpack benchmark. The Astra supercomputer at Sandia National Laboratories, which runs on Arm processors, is the first result of Sandia’s Vanguard program, tasked to explore emerging techniques in supercomputing.
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