The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) on Wednesday announced its new supercomputer called Kestrel.
The new system will be built by Hewlett Packard Enterprise and will be powered by Intel’s Xeon Scalable Sapphire Rapids processor as well as Nvidia’s A100Next Tensor Core GPUs to accelerate AI.
The A100Next could be a die shrink to 5nm with more compute units, perhaps doubling via a chiplet design. Intel’s Sapphire Rapids CPU and Nvidia’s A100 GPU will work perfectly together via a PCIe bus, but they will not be able to efficiently share memory pools since Intel’s processor does not support NVLink, whereas Nvidia’s A100 compute modules do not support the CXL protocol.
There will be some changes with the next-generation Nvidia compute GPU to address this shortcoming.
