HPE to Help NNSA Process Modeling, Simulation Workloads With ‘Astra’ Supercomputer

The Energy Department has selected Hewlett Packard Enterprise to provide a supercomputer for DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration to process simulation and modeling workloads intended for science, energy and national security applications.

HPE will deploy the Astra supercomputer at Sandia Labs Laboratories as part of the Vanguard program, the company said Monday.

Astra is based on the Arm processing architecture and is designed to run on the company’s Apollo 70 high-performance computing platform based on the Cavium ThunderX2 Arm processor.

The supercomputer consists of more than 145,000 cores in 2,592 dual-processor servers and works to deliver higher system density and memory performance as well as provide at least 2.3 theoretical peak petaflops of performance.

NNSA “is committed to the advancement of high performance computing in support of the nation’s stockpile stewardship,” said Mark Anderson, director of NNSA’s office of advanced simulation and computing and institutional research and development.