New supercomputers “Hunter” and “Herder” will be based on the Instinct MI300A

On December 6, 2023, AMD hosted an event titled “Advancing AI,” where it unveiled the next generation of data center-oriented Instinct MI300 series compute cards. The initial offering included two products: the Instinct MI300A (CPU+GPU) and the Instinct MI300X (pure GPU). These products integrate the latest CDNA 3 and Zen 4 architectures, delivering groundbreaking performance for High-Performance Computing (HPC) and AI workloads.

Recently, the High-Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS) in Germany announced that it had reached an agreement with HPE to build two new supercomputers, named “Hunter” and “Herder,” based on the Instinct MI300A. This development will significantly expand Germany’s high-performance computing capabilities. “Hunter,” a transitional supercomputing system, is set to commence operations in 2025 as part of the project’s first phase. In the second phase, scheduled for 2027, “Herder” will be installed, a supercomputer with exascale (ExaFLOP) computational capacity.

Officials state that “Hunter” and “Herder” will provide researchers with world-class infrastructure for simulations, artificial intelligence (AI), and high-performance data analytics (HPDA), propelling forward academic and industrial research in computational engineering and applied sciences. The entire project is estimated to cost 115 million Euros.

The Instinct MI300A is an APU designed with a small chip architecture, utilizing both 5nm and 6nm manufacturing processes and employing the fourth-generation Infinity Fabric solution. It features 24 cores based on the Zen 4 architecture, and three compute dies, each with two CDNA 3 architecture-based GCDs, accounting for 228 compute units and corresponding to 14,592 stream processors. Equipped with 128GB of HBM3, it offers a memory bandwidth of 5.3TB/s.