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Tachyum Prodigy Universal Processor Enabling 50 EF / 8 AI ZF Supercomputers in 2025

  • Dec 12, 2023 Date of publishing
  • 15 Pages

Introduction

Supercomputing reached a crucial milestone in 2022 with the deployment of Frontier, the first exascale supercomputer, at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). Frontier runs at 1.2 exaflops (EF) of FP64 performance. 2023 promises more of the same with the rollout of Aurora at Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), which is estimated to provide more than 2 EF of performance when it’s fully deployed. Additional exaflop clusters will follow, driven by the ever-expanding needs of compute-intensive workloads such as quantum mechanics, weather forecasting, oil and gas exploration, molecular modeling, aerodynamics, nuclear fusion research, and cryptoanalysis.

Hyperscalers are offering large HPC systems in the cloud, and in 2023 a system named Eagle, installed in the Microsoft Azure Cloud, has taken the No. 3 spot in the top 500 list with 561.2 PF of performance. This is the highest rank a cloud system has ever achieved in the TOP500. Two years ago, a previous Azure system was the first cloud system ever to enter the TOP10 in the number 10 spot.

Looking ahead to next generation supercomputers, the US Dept. of Energy (DOE), who runs several of the world’s premier supercomputing labs including ORNL and ANL, issued an RFI (request for information) in June of 2022 outlining their supercomputer requirements for the 2025 – 2030 timeframe. Key supercomputer requirements outlined in the RFI for 2025 – 2030 include the following:

  • HPC Performance (FP64): 10 – 20+ EF
  • AI Performance: 8 – 16x FP64 performance: 80 – 320+ EF
  • Supercomputer area: 4,000 – 6,000 square feet

Earlier this year, Tachyum announced that it had accepted a purchase order from a US company to build a large supercomputer that far exceeds not only the performance of existing supercomputers, but also the target performance for next-generation systems. The new supercomputer will be built with Tachyum’s Prodigy Universal Processor, delivering the unprecedented performance of 50 EF of FP64, and 8 ZF of AI training for large language models. Prodigy’s revolutionary new architecture coupled with advanced system scalability enables this extraordinary performance.

This paper provides an overview of the Tachyum Prodigy Universal Processor, summarizes how the Prodigy Family differs from existing processor architectures, discusses the Prodigy roadmap, and presents details for the new HPC/AI supercomputer data center design developed by Tachyum’s world-class systems, solutions, and software engineering teams.