HPE's Astra will be the world's largest Arm-based supercomputer built for
Sandia National Laboratories and the US Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).

The NNSA will use the supercomputer to run advanced modeling and simulation workloads for things like national security, energy, science and health care.

Set to be delivered later this year, Astra is comprised of 5,184 Arm-based processors -- the Thunder X2 processor, built by Cavium. Each processor has 28 cores and runs at 2 GHz. Astra will deliver over 2.3 theoretical peak petaflops of performance, which should put it well within the top 100 supercomputers ever built.

Last year, the US committed to investing $258 million over three years in an effort to develop a supercomputer capable of hitting one exaflop. Along with HPE, the money was awarded to AMD, Cray, IBM, Intel, and Nvidia.

Astra will run on the HPE Apollo 70. HPE is also delivering a power-efficient liquid cooling system, called the MCS-300 cooling unit, that is more efficient than traditional air-cooled Solutions. They're also providing an optimized storage solution that offers an all-flash Lustre filesystem for extreme bandwidth and reduced latency on data access. This parallel filesystem allows all processors to access the same file simultaneously.