AMD To Power Two Supercomputers In Germany: MI300A APU For “Hunter” In 2025, Exascale “Herder” In 2027

AMD's Instinct MI300X AI Throughput Performance & Latency Improved By 7x With GEMM Tuning 1

AMD has landed two supercomputer wins in Germany, powering the "Hunter" & "Herder" systems using its latest chips such as the Instinct MI300A.

The collaboration between AMD, HPC & University of Stuttgart is an effort to accelerate HPC & AI developments in the region, and the parties plan on unveiling two supercomputers, the Hunter, which is expected to reach functionality by 2025, and the Herder, which is an exascale system targeted for deployment by 2027.

Hunter and Herder are aimed at increasing the HPC & AI capabilities in the region to new heights, providing cutting-edge infrastructure for several industry applications such as artificial intelligence (AI), and high-performance data analytics (HPDA). The total combined cost for Hunter and Herder is expected to reach €115 million and will be funded by multiple government organizations.

Exascale #Supercomputing Is Coming to Stuttgart: Hunter will be based on the AMD Instinct MI300A accelerated processing unit (APU). This will slash the energy required to operate Hunter by approximately 80% at peak performance and will raise peak performance to 39 petaFLOPS. https://t.co/o6mv4xYdh5

— AMD (@AMD) December 19, 2023

Diving into the specifications of the Hunter supercomputer, it will feature an HPE Cray EX4000 supercomputer cabinet. It houses a total of 136 nodes, interconnected with four HPE Slingshot high-performance interconnects. The system will make full use of AMD's newly released MI300A accelerators which combine high-performance GPUs, CPUs, and HBM memory on a single chip package.

The integration of AMD's Instinct MI300A APUs will increase the peak performance of HLRS (High-Performance Computing Center Stuttgart) to 39 petaFLOPS with Hunter, a huge increase from the center's previous Hawk supercomputer, which was at 26 petaFLOPS. The final configuration of the Herder supercomputer is going to be determined by the end of 2025.

For a quick recap on AMD's MI300A Instinct APUs, it is an Exascale-class APU that makes use of TCO-optimized memory capacities & Zen 4 cores. You get 8 cores and 16 threads per CCD so that's a total of 24 cores and 48 threads on the active die. There's also 24 MB of L2 cache (1 MB per core) and a separate pool of cache (32 MB per CCD). Here is a highlight of the APU:

First Integrated CPU+GPthe U Package

Aiming Exascale Supercomputer Market

AMD MI300A (Integrated CPU + GPU)

AMD MI300X (GPU Only)

153 Billion Transistors

Up To 24 Zen 4 Cores

CDNA 3 GPU Architecture

Up To 192 GB HBM3 Memory

Up To 8 Chiplets + 8 Memory Stacks (5nm + 6nm process)

With the addition of the Hunter supercomputer in 2025, the computing power in the EU is going to ramp up, since the JUPITER supercomputer, which is currently in development, will be the first exascale-class one in the region. It will be interesting to see how the cutting-edge computational capabilities will bolster the overall development process, especially in the fields of AI and HPC.

News Source: HLRS