UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) has announced its next national supercomputer, ARCHER2, which uses AMD CPUs and will start operating in May 2020.

Designed by Cray, ARCHER2 ARCHER2 should be capable on average of over eleven times the science throughput of the current ARCHER supercomputer, based on benchmarks which use five of the most heavily used codes on the current service. The ARCHER2 science throughput codes used for the benchmarking evaluation are estimated to reach 8.7x for CP2K, 9.5x for OpenSBLI, 11.3x for CASTEP, 12.9x for GROMACS, and 18.0x for HadGEM3. These benchmarks show that ARCHER2 represents a significant step forwards in capability for the UK science community, with the system expected to sit among the fastest fully general purpose (CPU only) systems when it comes into service in May 2020.

ARCHER2 is being installed in the same room as the current ARCHER system. It is housed in 23 Cray Shasta Mountain direct liquid cooled cabinets. It consists of 5,848 compute nodes, each with dual AMD Rome 64 core CPUs at 2.2GHz, for 748,544 cores in total and 1.57 PBytes of total system memory. It also uses Cray next-generation Slingshot 100Gbps network in a diameter-three dragonfly topology, consisting of 46 compute groups, 1 I/O group and 1 Service group.

Four nodes with 16 next-generation AMD GPUs are also available as collaboration platforms.

Software stack:

• Cray Programming Environment including optimizing compilers and libraries for the AMD Rome CPU
• Cray Linux Environment optimized for the AMD CPU blade based on SLES 15
• Shasta Software Stack
• SLURM work load manager
• CrayPat as profiler
• GDB4HPC as debugger

The system is due to end operation on 18th February 2020, and will be operational from 6th May 2020. From the 6th May, there will be a period of 30 days continuous running to stress-test the new machine and sort out any issues before full service.