This week, an American multinational semiconductor company called AMD (Advanced Micro Devices) has launched a new tiny supercomputer called Project 47. This new innovation can pack an incredible 1 petaFLOPS of processing execution into a solitary server rack.
Whopping 1 petaFLOPS means the computer can process a quadrillion (thousand trillion) floating point operations per second. Means, the project is as powerful as IBM’s $100 million Roadrunner.
IBM’s $100 million Roadrunner requires 2,350,000 watts of power, 6,000 square feet of floor space, and 296 racks. In the case of this tiny supercomputer called Project 47 requires 98% less power and takes up 99.93% less space. Project 47 requires only 33.3 kW for a petaFLOPS of computation.
Unlike Roadrunner it can fit in just a single server rack. In actual, Project 47 consists of 80 Radeon Instinct GPUs, 20 AMD EPYC 7601 processors, and 20 Mellanox 100G cards. It also comprises 10TB of Samsung memory.
To develop this tiny supercomputer, the company used 2U parallel computing platform Inventec P47. And thus, Project 47 achieved 1 PetaFLOP by using a single Inventec P47 systems rack. Due to its 30 gigaFLOPS per watt energy efficiency, the system becomes 25 percent more efficient than competing supercomputing platforms.
The company noted, “Project 47 is a piece of a more extensive development to diminish the impression of supercomputers. Each walk forward means enhanced proficiency and less vitality used to get the same amount of or more than that computing power.”
“Project 47 rack beats any other comparably configured system in terms of computing units, cores/threads, memory channels, and I/O lanes in simultaneous use. The system should be on sale later this year, although AMD has yet to release the price.”