I think I read on some insight-article over Aurora on NextPlatform.com a few years ago, that today’s ‘Aurora’ is actually internally referred by them as AuroraNext.
To be fair, they bluntly sold a fairy tale and blueprints about some soon-to-be-engineered Supercomputer-hardware and resulting arbitrary performance-numbers, and that’s basically it.
Ironically enough, Intel didn’t made a single dime with anything Aurora…
As the ~$600M USD contract-penalty and compensation for delayed completion netted Intel a hefty loss on top of all the delaying mess. Intel had to pay ANL a fine of $299M USD while the remainder Intel managed to blame-shift to Cray Computing (as if Cray could’ve done anything to prevent the actual Intel-mess!).
Since initially the whole contract for Aurora was awarded with $200M USD, netting Intel a -$100M loss (on paper), bar the years-long costs of billion USD for hardware-designing, the excessively faulty and costy SPR- and Ponte Vecchio-prototyping and costs of final installation.
Rumour had it back then, that Intel had to guarantee the ANL a 2-year cost-free window of maintenancepost-installation (complete absorption of costs on Intel’s behalf, including the outrageous power-bill), in order to prevent the ANL angrily throwing in the towel after all the delayes, switching to completely AMD/Nvidia once and for all.
That’s why the ANL the very moment Aurora was supposed to be completed in 2021, immediately contracted another smaller Super-Computer and awarded AMD/Nvidia the Polaris alongside Aurora (equipped with AMD’s Epyc-CPUs and Nvidia’s A100 Tensor-GPUs), as a interim-solution (and threat towards Intel, to hurry up).
Ironically, Polaris, being awarded in August 2021, was already completed well before Aurora itself ahead of schedule in August 2022 …
So in other words, the ANL was so darn bold, to award and contract another testbed Super-Computer in-between from the very money of the former contractual penalty Intel and Cray paid them ($600M USD), just to have it installed right in front of Intel’s Aurora, while having Intel and Cray pay for everything!
Oh, and having granted another Super-Computer free of charge after it (Aurora itself), just because.
If that isn’t some absolute genius “F–ck you, Intel!”, I don’t know what is …
Actually, Aurora never really materialised, as the original Aurora was cancelled even before any kind of hardware-installation took place (The one with the Xeon Phi; → Knights Landing), when Intel pulled the plug on anything Xeon Phi right before Aurora’s supposedly scheduled beginning installation in 2015 and to be delivered completed for 2018.
After it, Intel somehow again sold the ANL (Argonne National Laboratory, U.S. Energy Department) the blueprint of another Super-Computer scheduled for installation in 2021, which in turn *again* was spec-wise pretty much made up and hardware-wise out of thin air (on both instances, same as the original one). As Intel had neither any clue if they’d be able to deliver as promised nor had they the supposed hardware at any disposal.
Talking about delusion and bragging for a living …
Cringy enough, they hadn’t even engineered any whatsoever hardware by then (Sapphire Rapids, Ponte Vecchio) which was supposed to make up Aurora in the first place, that’s why it took so long to deliver anything.
Aurora was announced so long ago, granted the scale of it has been increased 2 or 3 times now.
I originally thought they would have some time at top but El Capitan isn’t far behind now.
They redesigned it completely as intel phased out Xeon phi. It’s still a couple of years delayed though.
I think I read on some insight-article over Aurora on NextPlatform.com a few years ago, that today’s ‘Aurora’ is actually internally referred by them as AuroraNext.
To be fair, they bluntly sold a fairy tale and blueprints about some soon-to-be-engineered Supercomputer-hardware and resulting arbitrary performance-numbers, and that’s basically it.
Ironically enough, Intel didn’t made a single dime with anything Aurora…
As the ~$600M USD contract-penalty and compensation for delayed completion netted Intel a hefty loss on top of all the delaying mess. Intel had to pay ANL a fine of $299M USD while the remainder Intel managed to blame-shift to Cray Computing (as if Cray could’ve done anything to prevent the actual Intel-mess!).
Since initially the whole contract for Aurora was awarded with $200M USD, netting Intel a -$100M loss (on paper), bar the years-long costs of billion USD for hardware-designing, the excessively faulty and costy SPR- and Ponte Vecchio-prototyping and costs of final installation.
Rumour had it back then, that Intel had to guarantee the ANL a 2-year cost-free window of maintenance post-installation (complete absorption of costs on Intel’s behalf, including the outrageous power-bill), in order to prevent the ANL angrily throwing in the towel after all the delayes, switching to completely AMD/Nvidia once and for all.
That’s why the ANL the very moment Aurora was supposed to be completed in 2021, immediately contracted another smaller Super-Computer and awarded AMD/Nvidia the Polaris alongside Aurora (equipped with AMD’s Epyc-CPUs and Nvidia’s A100 Tensor-GPUs), as a interim-solution (and threat towards Intel, to hurry up).
Ironically, Polaris, being awarded in August 2021, was already completed well before Aurora itself ahead of schedule in August 2022 …
So in other words, the ANL was so darn bold, to award and contract another testbed Super-Computer in-between from the very money of the former contractual penalty Intel and Cray paid them ($600M USD), just to have it installed right in front of Intel’s Aurora, while having Intel and Cray pay for everything!
Oh, and having granted another Super-Computer free of charge after it (Aurora itself), just because.
If that isn’t some absolute genius “F–ck you, Intel!”, I don’t know what is …
Actually, Aurora never really materialised, as the original Aurora was cancelled even before any kind of hardware-installation took place (The one with the Xeon Phi; → Knights Landing), when Intel pulled the plug on anything Xeon Phi right before Aurora’s supposedly scheduled beginning installation in 2015 and to be delivered completed for 2018.
After it, Intel somehow again sold the ANL (Argonne National Laboratory, U.S. Energy Department) the blueprint of another Super-Computer scheduled for installation in 2021, which in turn *again* was spec-wise pretty much made up and hardware-wise out of thin air (on both instances, same as the original one). As Intel had neither any clue if they’d be able to deliver as promised nor had they the supposed hardware at any disposal.
Talking about delusion and bragging for a living …
Cringy enough, they hadn’t even engineered any whatsoever hardware by then (Sapphire Rapids, Ponte Vecchio) which was supposed to make up Aurora in the first place, that’s why it took so long to deliver anything.