The US is preparing to create a new generation supercomputer with 10 PB of RAM

The Crossroads supercomputer (ATS-3), located at the US Department of Energy’s (DoE) Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), is not that old. The 30 Pflops system was launched in 2023, but a replacement is already being prepared for it in the form of a new generation supercomputer code-named ATS-5.

The Department of Energy, together with the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), has revealed some details regarding this project. The main task of ATS-5 will be to launch high-precision 3D simulations to assess the prospects for modernization and maintenance of the US nuclear arsenal. Simulations with such high detail are very complex and belong to the “hero-class” class. Running them can take months, but ATS-5 should not only reduce that time to days, but also allow multiple such simulations to be processed in parallel.

Crossroads installation. Source hereinafter LANL

NNSA is not saying whether ATS-5 will be an exascale system, but judging by the use of the term “post-exascale system” and the complexity of the simulations planned to run, the new supercomputer will be quite powerful. The level of its energy consumption is known – about 20 MW. For comparison, Frontier (1.35 FP64 EFLOPS) consumes 21 MW, and El Capitan (1.74 FP64 EFLOPS) consumes about 30 MW.

According to DoE, ATS-5 will be a modular system with a mixed architecture, focused not only on HPC tasks (FP64), but also on AI scenarios with their simplified computing formats. The emphasis is on placing data closer to the compute nodes, increasing memory capacity (currently stated at 10.1 PB) and speeding up its operation.

As an interconnect, a mixture of InfiniBand and Ethernet technologies can be used, developing from 100 to 300 GB/s in each direction. Modularity means that accelerators and processors can be replaced throughout the life of the ATS-5. In addition to NVIDIA accelerators, the possibility of using quantum accelerators, as well as Cerebras, Groq and SambaNova chips, is being considered. The software should be almost entirely open source, but they will not abandon CUDA if necessary.

The US Department of Energy hopes to place a contract for the construction of ATS-5 in May of this year. Equipment deliveries should begin at the end of 2026 or early 2027, and commissioning of the system is scheduled for August-September 2027. At the same time, Crossroads (ATS-3) will be disabled.