Supercomputer Thetais officially ready to operatealongside the IBM Blue Gene/Q supercomputer,Miraat theArgonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF).The supercomputers are to be usedexclusively for projects in engineering and research that require high computing power. They lead up to the opening of aneven bigger supercomputer, Aurora.

The computers will be used to explore topics inclimate science, particle-accelerators, biological sciences, materials, transportation efficiency, chemistry, cosmology, and energy storage.Just last year, companyVERIFI was awarded 60-million core hours to workwith Miraon creating and analyzing up to 100,000 engine simulations at a time.

Theta will be used to support several projects in the 2017-2018 DOE Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) Leadership Computing Challenge (ALCC) programs. Itcontains more than 230,000 parallel cores and almost 700 TB of memory, alone. With a performance of 9.65 Petaflops, it can perform close to 10quadrillionoperations every second, same as Mira.

Since the computer is anIntel-Craysystem, it uses a processor based off the 2nd generationIntel Xeon Phi. The processor uses MCDRAM--a high-bandwidth DRAM on a 3D chip made of computationally interconnected stacked wafers.It can becombined with DDR4 RAM tosupply max speeds of300-450 GB/s.DRAM stands for dynamic random access memory; itcan store massive amounts of data butloses it when power is removed.

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Supercomputer Theta, Open for Research - Machine Design