Back in the mid-2000s, AMD and IBM collaborated on a supercomputer project for the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, which featured over 64,000 dual-core Opteron processors and numerous custom accelerators to achieve 1 PetaFLOP of computing performance. For a time, the massive system – dubbed Roadrunner — was the fastest supercomputer on the planet. It required 696 racks and covered approximately 6,000 square feet.
Last night, at its Capsaicin event in Los Angeles, adjacent to SIGGRAPH which is currently underway, AMD unveiled a supercomputer with a similar performance featuring its recently released EPYC processors and upcoming Vega GPUs, but this time the system was small enough to be rolled out on stage and filled only a single rack.
The Project 47 super-computer was powered by 20 AMD EPYC 7601 processorsand 80 Radeon Instinct GPUs. Other hardware included 10TB of Samsung memory and 20 Mellanox 100G cards (and 1 switch). All told, Project 47 is capable of 1 PetaFLOPS of single-precision compute performance or 2 PetaFLOPS of half-precision.