Argonne National Laboratory opens ‘Aurora’ supercomputer to researchers

Pioneering exascale system brings advanced capabilities for simulation, AI and data analysis across many fields

Argonne National Laboratory has fully opened its Aurora exascale supercomputer to researchers across the world, heralding a new era of computing-driven discoveries.

Aurora is one of the world’s first exascale supercomputers, capable of performing at least a quintillion (or a billion billion) calculations per second. 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. 

It is located at Argonne National Laboratory, a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory affiliated with the University of Chicago.

Scientists can apply to use the supercomputer to perform calculations for studies that are in many cases impossible to do elsewhere. With powerful capabilities for simulation, artificial intelligence and data analysis, Aurora is expected to drive breakthroughs in a range of fields including airplane design, drug discovery, cosmology 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, which runs Aurora. ​“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.”

Exascale and AI: boosting the speed of science

Three machines at U.S. national laboratories are not only the first to reach the exascale benchmark, but are also currently the three fastest systems in the world. Aurora is one, along with Frontier at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and El Capitan at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

“We’re honored to be home to one of the most powerful supercomputers ever built,” said Argonne Director Paul Kearns. ​“The development of the Department of Energy’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, professor of computer science at the University of Chicago and 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,” Stevens said. “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 develop high-fidelity models of complex systems, such as the human circulatory system, 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 and CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.

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, Aurora is equipped with 63,744 graphics processing units (GPUs) and 84,992 network endpoints, making it one of the largest supercomputer installations to date. 

“Bringing a system of this scale to life comes with a unique set of challenges,” said Susan Coghlan, Argonne Leadership Computing Facility 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.”

Now that Aurora is in production, it has begun supporting over 70 diverse science and engineering projects. This includes projects from the Early Science Program, 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/​a​urora.

—Adapted from an article first published by Argonne National Laboratory.