Indiana University’s Big Red 200 Supercomputer Will Rock NVIDIA Ampere GPUs And AMD EPYC Rome Crusher CPUs

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In sticking with the plan that was announced last summer, Indiana University is now the owner of Cray's first "Shasta" supercomputer. As shown in the image above, it bears the university's color scheme and is called Big Red 200, which is a tribute to the 200th anniversary of IU. In addition to oozing school pride, Big Red 200 is notable because it will rock NVIDIA's next-generation Ampere GPUs.

NVIDIA has not yet released Ampere, but is expected to soon. We have covered various leaks and rumors on the subject, as it pertains to NVIDIA's efforts in the gaming space, but Ampere will also find a home in datacenters and supercomputer applications. Or at least that is the expectation, based on what information has been shared.

Big Red 200 is being deployed in two phases. The first phase is already up and running and consists of 672 dual-socket nodes powered by AMD's EPYC 7742 "Rome" processors, each with 64 physical cores and 128 threads of computing muscle. That works out to a staggering 86,016 cores and 172,032 threads—plenty enough to play Crysis, before anyone asks.