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 …
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 …