A blade server featuring the powerful AMD Instinct MI300A APU from the upcoming El Capitan Supercomputer was showcased at the ISC High Performance event in Hamburg, Germany. The server blade, known as the HPE Cray Supercomputing EX255a accelerator blade, includes eight MI300A chips in a single-slot 1U blade chassis. The compact design incorporates copper cooling blocks and tubes for efficient heat dissipation, with each MI300A APU having a TDP of 550W.
Liquid cooling is employed to manage the considerable heat generated by the eight APUs, with the blade cooling system capable of handling up to 6,080W. Each blade also contains two 4-socket node cards equipped with two MI300A APUs per card, with room for an additional NVMe SSD if needed. The blade features four to eight injection ports designed to connect to El Capitan’s HPE Slingshot-11 networking system.
El Capitan is set to become the world’s fastest supercomputer upon its completion later this year, surpassing the AMD-based Frontier supercomputer. Powered by AMD’s cutting-edge technology, the El Capitan supercomputer boasts the MI300A APU, featuring 24 Zen 4 CPU cores and a CDNA3 GPU with 224 compute units and 14,592 streaming processors. The MI300A chip utilizes HBM3 Memory with a total capacity of 128GB and is AMD’s largest chip to date, with nine connected compute dies.
Constructed by Hewlett Packard Enterprise using the Shasta architecture and Slingshot-11 network subsystem, El Capitan will reach over 2 exaflops of computing power, making it nearly twice as fast as its predecessor, Frontier. The supercomputer uses a combination of 5nm TSMC process for CPUs and GPUs, along with 6nm-based dies for 3D Stacked Dies. El Capitan’s configuration makes it a noteworthy advancement in high-performance computing technology, positioning it at the forefront of supercomputing capabilities.
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https://www.tomshardware.com/desktops/servers/hpe-flaunts-el-capitan-supercomputer-blade-with-amds-instinct-mi300-projected-to-be-worlds-fastest-when-finished-this-year
