Polaris is an HPE Apollo 6500 Gen 10+ system equipped with AMD CPUs and NVIDIA GPUs to deliver powerful, scalable computing for complex scientific workloads. (Image: Argonne National Laboratory)
Polaris
With advanced simulation, AI, and analysis capabilities, Polaris enables researchers to tackle complex challenges in science and engineering.
Developed in collaboration with HPE, ALCF’s Polaris supercomputer provides researchers with powerful capabilities for complex scientific workloads, including large-scale simulations, AI, and data analysis.
The Polaris software environment is equipped with the HPE Cray programming environment, HPE Performance Cluster Manager (HPCM) system software, and the ability to test programming models, such as OpenMP and SYCL, that will be available on Aurora and the next-generation of DOE’s high performance computing systems. Polaris users will also benefit from NVIDIA’s HPC software development kit, a suite of compilers, libraries, and tools for GPU code development.
For system details, visit the Polaris user guide.
Polaris and Aurora will have many similarities at the system and user level.
Polaris System Specs
Peak Performance
34 petaflops (44 petaflops of Tensor Core FP64 performance)
NVIDIA GPU
A100
AMD EPYC Processor
Milan
Platform
HPE Apollo Gen10+
Compute Node
1 AMD EPYC "Milan" processor; 4 NVIDIA A100 GPUs; Unified Memory Architecture; 2 fabric endpoints; 2 NVMe SSDs
GPU Architecture
NVIDIA A100 GPU; HBM stack
CPU-GPU Interconnect
CPU-GPU: PCIe; GPU-GPU: NVLink
System Interconnect
HPE Slingshot 11; Dragonfly topology with adaptive routing
Network Switch
200 Gbps (after Slingshot-11 upgrade*)
Node Performance
78 Teraflops (double precision)
System Size
560 nodes
