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A Supercomputer’s Final Mission Will Help Us Understand the Universe
Mira is retiring to make room for the fastest supercomputer in the country — but first, it’s finishing its biggest project yet
What will soon be America’s fastest supercomputer is expected to log online in 2021. Named Aurora, it will be capable of a quintillion (a billion billion) calculations per second, making it about 50 times swifter than today’s most powerful computers and fast enough to start mapping the human brain’s one million billion or so connections. Scientists also hope the supercomputer, which will be housed at the Argonne National Laboratory in Lemont, Illinois, will supercharge A.I. to aid in the development of new cancer treatments, pinpoint places to look for dark matter, and enable the discovery of novel materials that could improve everything from batteries to medicines.
Aurora, in short, is an extremely exciting and highly anticipated development.
But this story is not about Aurora, the hotshot new machine that all of the computational scientists are buzzing about. It’s about Mira, the seven-year-old and still very capable supercomputer that is shutting down this year in order to make room for the newbie.
Mira is a little more than two months from being phased out, but it isn’t easing into retirement. Instead, Mira is quietly hard at work on the biggest task of its career: simulating how a large portion of our universe evolved over billions of years — a project that will help answer fundamental questions about our existence.
Mira is having a last hurrah.
“We don’t have a plan for cake or champagne — and technically we can’t have champagne on the premises,” says Katherine Riley, the director of science at Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, who has worked on Mira and its predecessors of the same architecture for the last 15 years. “This may sound like a really nerdy version of cake, but it’s really our cake.” Scientists at the computing facility have dubbed the project “The Last Journey.”
