The United States has almost a deal with the Nvidia supercomputer, as it expects Intel machine sources to be delayed

August 24 (Reuters) – The U.S. Department of Energy is close to a deal to buy a chip-based supercomputer from Nvidia Corp (NVDA.O) and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD.O) while a lab key expects a larger supercomputer from Intel Corp. (INTC.O) that has been delayed for months, two people familiar with the matter told Reuters.

The Nvidia and AMD machine, which will be called Polaris, will not replace the Intel-based Aurora machine for the Argonne national lab near Chicago, which was announced in 2019 as the country’s fastest computer.

Instead, Polaris, which will go online this year, will be a test machine for Argonne to start preparing its software for the Intel machine, according to people who knew the issue.

Aronne spokesman Ben Schiltz did not immediately respond to a request for comment, nor did AMD spokesman Aaron Grabein. Nvidia spokesman Ken Brown declined to comment.

Intel, AMD and Nvidia are fighting for market share of the chips used in data centers. The U.S. supercomputer range does scientific work for health, climate and other researchers, as well as conducting virtual tests of the country’s nuclear weapons.

Key pioneering technologies in systems tend to seep into commercial data centers in later years, giving chip companies the advantage of winning the contract.

When Aurora was announced, Intel and Argonne said the machine would be delivered in 2021, but Intel has yet to deliver the key chips Ponte Vecchio and Sapphire Rapids. Intel said in June that the Sapphire Rapids chips would not be in production until 2022 and on Tuesday Intel spokesman Will Moss said the company had pledged to deliver the computer by 2022.

The $ 500 million contract required Intel and its partners to deliver a computer with so-called exaflop performance or the ability to perform 1 quintillion (or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000) calculations per second. Now, the first exascale computer in the United States will probably be a different machine in a different lab – the Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee – built by Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. (HPE.N) with AMD chips that will be delivered in late this year. .

The Polaris machine in Argonne will not be as powerful as the Intel machine, sources said. Based on Nvidia’s A100 chips and AMD’s Rome and Milan chips, the Polaris computer will be able to do some exaflop calculations, but mostly it will run at lower speeds.

Reports from Stephen Nellis to San Francisco; edited by Peter Henderson and Jonathan Oatis

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