Scientists are using Aurora to drive breakthroughs in cancer research, materials discovery, energy technologies and many other fields.
The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory has released its Aurora exascale supercomputer to researchers across the world, heralding a new era of computing-driven discoveries.
With powerful capabilities for simulation, artificial intelligence (AI) and data analysis, Aurora will drive breakthroughs in a range of fields including airplane design, cosmology, drug discovery and nuclear energy research.
“We’re ecstatic to officially deploy Aurora for open scientific research,” said Michael Papka, director of the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF), a DOE Office of Science user facility. “Early users have given us a glimpse of Aurora’s vast potential. We’re eager to see how the broader scientific community will use the system to transform their research.”
“From modeling extremely complex physical systems to processing huge amounts of data, Aurora will accelerate discoveries that deepen our understanding of the world around us.” — Katherine Riley, ALCF director of science at Argonne National Laboratory
Exascale and AI: boosting the speed of science
Aurora is one of the world’s first exascale supercomputers, along with Frontier at DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory and El Capitan at DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Exascale refers to systems capable of performing at least an exaflop — a quintillion (or a billion billion) calculations per second. The DOE machines are not only the first to reach exascale but are also currently the three fastest systems in the world.
“We’re honored to be home to one of the most powerful supercomputers ever built,” said Argonne Director Paul Kearns. “The development of DOE’s exascale systems is an important step in advancing fundamental science and strengthening U.S. leadership in high performance computing.”
Aurora has already established itself as one of the world’s leading systems in AI performance, earning the top spot on the HPL-MxP benchmark in November 2024. Its advanced capabilities for AI tasks are being used by scientists to discover new battery materials, design new drugs and accelerate fusion energy research. Before its deployment, an Argonne-led team demonstrated Aurora’s potential by using it to train AI models for an innovative protein design framework.
“A big target for Aurora is training large language models for science,” said Rick Stevens, Argonne associate laboratory director for Computing, Environment and Life Sciences. “With the AuroraGPT project, for example, we are building a science-oriented foundation model that can distill knowledge across many domains from biology to chemistry. One of the goals with Aurora is to enable researchers to create new AI tools that help them make progress as fast as they can think — not just as fast as their computations.”
Among the initial projects on Aurora, researchers are working to create “digital twins” of complex systems, such as the human body, nuclear reactors and supernovae, to gain new insights into their behavior. Additionally, its capacity to process massive datasets is critical for analyzing the growing data streams from large-scale research facilities such as Argonne’s Advanced Photon Source (APS), a DOE Office of Science user facility, and CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.
“The projects running on Aurora represent some of the most ambitious and innovative science happening today,” said Katherine Riley, ALCF director of science. “From modeling extremely complex physical systems to processing huge amounts of data, Aurora will accelerate discoveries that deepen our understanding of the world around us.”
Collaborative development: building and preparing Aurora for science
Aurora’s deployment marks the culmination of years of collaboration. Built in partnership with Intel and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Aurora is equipped with 63,744 GPUs (graphics processing units) and 84,992 network endpoints, making it one of the largest supercomputer installations to date. Spanning eight rows of refrigerator-sized cabinets, the machine weighs 600 tons, covers 10,000 square feet — the size of two professional basketball courts — and is interconnected by 300 miles of networking cables.
“Bringing a system of this scale to life comes with a unique set of challenges,” said Susan Coghlan, ALCF project director for Aurora. “It required working with entirely new technologies at an unprecedented scale. Seeing the machine fully operational and ready to support science speaks to the hard work and expertise of everyone involved.”
To ensure Aurora was ready for science on day one of its deployment, the system was built through a collaborative process called co-design. Using this approach, the Aurora team developed the system hardware and scientific software in tandem to optimize performance and usability. This required years of collaboration between the ALCF, Intel, HPE and researchers across the nation participating in DOE’s Exascale Computing Project (ECP) and the ALCF’s Aurora Early Science Program (ESP).
While Aurora was being installed, ECP and ESP teams ran applications to stress-test the hardware while simultaneously optimizing their codes to run as efficiently as possible on the system. This resulted in dozens of scientific applications, along with a wide range of software and programming tools, being ready for Aurora before it entered production.
“Part of the process of bringing a new supercomputer online involves putting it through its paces with real codes running real science problems,” said Kalyan Kumaran, ALCF director of technology. “This is key to achieving our goal of enabling science on day one of a new supercomputer’s launch.”
Now that Aurora is in production, it has begun supporting over 70 diverse science and engineering projects. This includes projects from the ESP, as well as those awarded computing time through DOE’s two primary allocation programs: the Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) and the ASCR Leadership Computing Challenge (ALCC).
To learn more about Aurora, visit: https://www.alcf.anl.gov/aurora. For details on getting started with Aurora, visit: https://docs.alcf.anl.gov/aurora/getting-started-on-aurora/.
The Argonne Leadership Computing Facility provides supercomputing capabilities to the scientific and engineering community to advance fundamental discovery and understanding in a broad range of disciplines. Supported by the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Office of Science, Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) program, the ALCF is one of two DOE Leadership Computing Facilities in the nation dedicated to open science.
About the Advanced Photon Source
The U. S. Department of Energy Office of Science’s Advanced Photon Source (APS) at Argonne National Laboratory is one of the world’s most productive X-ray light source facilities. The APS provides high-brightness X-ray beams to a diverse community of researchers in materials science, chemistry, condensed matter physics, the life and environmental sciences, and applied research. These X-rays are ideally suited for explorations of materials and biological structures; elemental distribution; chemical, magnetic, electronic states; and a wide range of technologically important engineering systems from batteries to fuel injector sprays, all of which are the foundations of our nation’s economic, technological, and physical well-being. Each year, more than 5,000 researchers use the APS to produce over 2,000 publications detailing impactful discoveries, and solve more vital biological protein structures than users of any other X-ray light source research facility. APS scientists and engineers innovate technology that is at the heart of advancing accelerator and light-source operations. This includes the insertion devices that produce extreme-brightness X-rays prized by researchers, lenses that focus the X-rays down to a few nanometers, instrumentation that maximizes the way the X-rays interact with samples being studied, and software that gathers and manages the massive quantity of data resulting from discovery research at the APS.
This research used resources of the Advanced Photon Source, a U.S. DOE Office of Science User Facility operated for the DOE Office of Science by Argonne National Laboratory under Contract No. DE-AC02-06CH11357.
Argonne National Laboratory seeks solutions to pressing national problems in science and technology by conducting leading-edge basic and applied research in virtually every scientific discipline. Argonne is managed by UChicago Argonne, LLC for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.
The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit https://energy.gov/science.
