Indiana University has purchased a new Cray supercomputer called the Big Red 200. Assembly is currently in progress, and whilst it could be completed on a much shorter timeframe, the university has decided to postpone the GPU installation until summer in order to get access to Nvidia's next-generation hardware, splitting the assembly up into two phases.
This alternate plan is because the new GPUs are expected to offer 70-75% improvement in performance over the current-generation hardware, as noted by The Next Platform, the Volta-based V100 GPUs that would have been installed otherwise. For the IU Big Red 200 supercomputer, it means that the performance will still jump from the original predicted 5.9 petaflops to 8 petaflops with fewer GPUs.
The Big Red 200 succeeds the Big Red 2 installed in 2013. The new supercomputer is a Cray Shasta machine and is being built using 1,344 AMD Epyc 7742 processors. With 64 cores per CPU, the supercomputer will have a total of 86,000 cores and 172,000 threads to play with. This makes it one of the smaller supercomputers based on the Cray Shasta platform, as the UK Research and Innovation's Archer 2 system packs a significantly bigger punch. The GPU count is expected to be 256 units. Nevertheless, it will be the first Cray Shasta supercomputer in operation.
Exactly when the GPUs will be available or announced remains a mystery, but Indiana University has indicated that 256 Tensor Core GPUs will be installed in the fall. Given that timeframe and Nvidia announcing GPUs at GTC conferences in the past, it's likely we'll be see details of the Ampere architecture revealed at GTC during Nvidia's keynote on March 23.
