UK's ARCHER2 supercomputer to integrate ~12,000 AMD EPYC Rome CPUs

Most of the supercomputers scheduled to go online in the next few years are located in the U.S. and China. Europe is usually trailing behind, but, with the latest developments at the University of Edinburgh from the UK, the old continent should be able to get right back in the big supercomputer leagues.
 
The University of Edinburgh will be replacing the current ARCHER supercomputer that cost 43 million pounds back in 2013 with the upcoming ARCHER2 model, whose implementation is estimated at 79 million pounds. The UK government has contracted HP subsidiary Cray to handle the implementation tasks. ARCHER2 is expected to be fully functional by May 2020 and will be powered by AMD’s EPYC Rome server-grade CPUs that should boost the peak performance by 11X over the current model. This will allow ARCHER2 to join the top 5 fastest supercomputers in the world and become the fastest CPU-only supercomputer.
 
The ARCHER2 specs list includes:

• 28 PFLOP/s theoretical throughput
• 5,848 compute nodes consisting of dual EPYC Rome CPUs clocked at 2.2 GHz
• total of 748,544 cores coupled with 1.57 PBytes of RAM and 14.5 PBytes storeage
• 1.1 PByte all-flash Lustre BurstBuffer file system
• 1+1 PByte separate file system configured for recovery purposes
• Cray Slinghsot 100 Gbps interconnect
• 23 Shasta Mountain direct liquid-cooled cabinets
• Cray Programming + Cray Linux software environments optimized for AMD’s EPYC Rome CPUs