Vanguard Astra - Petascale ARM Platform for U.S. DOE/ASC Supercomputing

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Astra is a 2.3 petaflop ARM prototype at Sandia with about 2,600 nodes (dual‑socket Cavium ThunderX2, 28 cores @2.0 GHz, eight DDR4 channels per socket) connected via Mellanox EDR ConnectX‑5; the system is housed in a new data center using a thermosyphon and consumes ~1 MW. Software work centers on the Advanced Tri‑Lab Software Environment, OpenHPC builds, Singularity containers and Lustre client tests. Early runs hit 1.5 PF at ~80% efficiency and strong memory‑bandwidth performance (HPCG ∼36), proving the architecture viable for DOE ASC workloads.

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" chapters (12)

1. 0:00Introduction to Vanguard program
2. 2:59Astra system overview
3. 7:40Cooling and data center challenges
4. 8:00Software stack and ecosystem
5. 15:28Performance and early results
6. 18:17Containers and virtualization on ARM
7. 21:10Optimizations and future work
8. 23:04OpenHPC collaboration and lessons learned
9. 25:13Memory bandwidth and HPL vs HPCC
10. 28:53GPU considerations and future plans
11. 30:10Workload focus and emerging trends
12. 31:12Q&A and closing remarks