The UK Center for Research and Innovation (UKRI) announced that HPE's Cray had been awarded the contract to build the Archer 2 supercomputer.
The new supercomputer should be 11 times more powerful than the Archer. However, since the Archer 2 will be built in the same room as the previous model, it will have a two to three month break.
Archer 2 will feature 11.696 AMD Epyc Rome processors, which will allow the device to provide almost 1,5 million processing threads to users.
Archer 2
Archer 2 will help the UK scientific and research community by providing a significant increase in computing power.
Based on pre-build performance estimates, the new supercomputer already appears longer than the current Archer system and should be able to deliver 8.7x CP2K, 9.5x OpenSBLI, 11.3x CASTEP, 12.9x GROMACS, and 18.0 x in HadGEM3. Archer 2's maximum throughput is estimated at 28 PFLOPs per second.
Cray's latest supercomputer will be located in Edinburgh and its internal components will be housed in 23 Shasta Mountain liquid-cooled cabinets. Inside Archer 2 will contain 5.848 compute nodes, each with two AMD Rome 64C/128T processors running at 2.2 GHz, as well as 1.57PS of RAM.
The original Archer supercomputer will end on February 18, 2020, and Archer 2 will only be operational a few months later on May 6, 2020, according to the official UKRI supercomputer website. Those who want to work with Archer 2 will have to wait another month to access it, since the system will be tested for 30 days.
Source: Hexus