Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) showcased a blade server from its upcoming El Capitan supercomputer at the ISC High Performance event in Hamburg, Germany. The blade server, called the HPE Cray Supercomputing EX255a accelerator blade, features AMD’s new Instinct MI300A AI accelerator and is housed in a single-slot 1U blade chassis. Despite its compact size, the blade packs 8 MI300A chips, each with a TDP of 550W and a maximum power rating of 760W. Liquid cooling is used to manage the significant heat generated by these chips, with copper cooling blocks and tubes providing effective thermal management.
Each blade contains two 4-socket node cards, with two MI300A APUs on each card. Additionally, the blades include an M.2 NVMe SSD and multiple injection ports designed to connect to HPE Slingshot from El Capitan’s network system. Once operational later this year, the HPE El Capitan supercomputer is poised to become the fastest supercomputer in the world, surpassing the Frontier supercomputer powered by AMD.
The Instinct MI300A APU, featured in the blade server, boasts 24 Zen 4-based CPU cores and a CDNA3-based GPU with 224 compute units and 14,592 streaming processors. The CPU and GPU share access to 8 HBM3 memory stacks with a maximum capacity of 128GB. This chip is the largest ever produced by AMD, with a total of 9 connected compute dies (1 CPU, 8 GPU). TSMC’s 5nm process node is used for the APU CPUs and GPUs, while 6nm-based dies are utilized for 3D stacked dies.
The El Capitan supercomputer is set to revolutionize high-performance computing with its unprecedented processing power and advanced technology. The inclusion of AMD’s Instinct MI300A APU in the blade server is a testament to HPE’s commitment to delivering cutting-edge solutions for complex computational tasks. Liquid cooling solutions ensure efficient heat management, allowing the system to operate at optimal performance levels. Once deployed, the El Capitan supercomputer is expected to set new benchmarks for speed and efficiency in the supercomputing industry.
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