Not content with a new supercomputer and AI cluster at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the US Department of Energy (DoE) has put in an order for a further two, this time to be housed at Argonne National Laboratory (ANL).
The two AI supercomputers, named Solstice and Equinox, will be created by Oracle and Nvidia and have been tipped as a future “powerhouse for scientific and technological innovation” by US secretary of energy Chris White.
Solstice is the bigger of the supercomputers, with what Nvidia claims is a “record-breaking” 100,000 Blackwell GPUs. Equinox, meanwhile, will feature 10,000 Blackwell GPUs and will be the first to be completed, with an estimated delivery date of H1 2026.
There’s no date given for Solstice, but once it comes online the two will be connected to Equinox via Nvidia networking to deliver an expected 2,200 exaflops of “AI performance”, according to Nvidia. This would make the cluster more powerful than Frontier – the first exascale supercomputer – or the current most powerful supercomputer, El Capitan.
This will be a combined output, however, rather than per supercomputer and it’s unclear at this point whether it’s Rmax, a verified output achieved on the HPL benchmark, or Rpeak, a theoretical maximum output.
ITPro approached Oracle for more technical details of its involvement, but did not receive any information at the time of publication.
Commenting on the announcement, Paul Kearns, director of ANL said: “The Equinox and Solstice systems are designed to accelerate a broad set of scientific AI workflows, and we are collaborating with Oracle and NVIDIA to prepare thousands of researchers to effectively leverage the systems’ groundbreaking capabilities.
“This system will seamlessly connect to forefront DoE experimental facilities such as our Advanced Photon Source, allowing scientists to address some of the nation’s most pressing challenges through scientific discovery.”
DoE supercomputer tsunami
Solstice and Equinox aren’t the only supercomputers to be announced by the DoE this week. On Monday 27 October, HPE revealed it was building a new supercomputer for the agency, called Discovery, at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in collaboration with AMD. This is in addition to an AI cluster called Lux that will also feature AMD chips and networking.
Similarly, Nvidia announced a collaboration with HPE to create another two supercomputers – Vision and Mission – for the DoE’s Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Like Discovery, this will be based on HPE’s Cray GX5000 supercomputing system but will feature Nvidia Vera Rubin CPUs, Rubin GPUs, and Quantum-X800 Infiniband networking. Like most of the other announcements this week, there’s no hard date for delivery of these systems other than “in the coming years”.
A final three Nvidia-based supercomputers – Tara, Minerva, and Janus – were also announced but are even lighter on detail; other than their names and that they will be located again at ANL, no further information has been given.
The US DoE is one of the primary consumers of supercomputing technology. The top three spots in the Top500 table of the most powerful supercomputers in the world are occupied by DoE systems:
- El Capitan at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
- Frontier at ORNL
- Aurora at ANL, where Solstice and Equinox will also be sited
All three existing DoE supercomputers are relatively new as well. El Capitan came online in 2024, Frontier in 2021, and Aurora in 2023.
Make sure to follow ITPro on Google News to keep tabs on all our latest news, analysis, and reviews.
MORE FROM ITPRO
- Inside Isambard-AI: The UK’s most powerful supercomputer
- Europe's first exascale supercomputer, Jupiter, is now live
- Inside Lumi, one of the world’s greenest supercomputers
-
Trump's AI executive order could leave US in a 'regulatory vacuum'News Citing a "patchwork of 50 different regulatory regimes" and "ideological bias", President Trump wants rules to be set at a federal level
-
TPUs: Google's home advantageITPro Podcast How does TPU v7 stack up against Nvidia's latest chips – and can Google scale AI using only its own supply?
-
France is getting its first exascale supercomputer – and it's named after an early French AI pioneerNews The Alice Recoque system will be be France’s first, and Europe’s second, exascale supercomputer
-
Nvidia just announced new supercomputers and an open AI model family for science at SC 2025News The chipmaker is building out its ecosystem for scientific HPC, even as it doubles down on AI factories
-
HPE's new Cray system is a pocket powerhouseNews Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has unveiled new HPC storage, liquid cooling, and supercomputing offerings ahead of SC25
-
UK to host largest European GPU cluster under £11 billion Nvidia investment plansNews Nvidia says the UK will host Europe’s largest GPU cluster, totaling 120,000 Blackwell GPUs by the end of 2026, in a major boost for the country’s sovereign compute capacity.
-
Inside Isambard-AI: The UK’s most powerful supercomputerLong read Now officially inaugurated, Isambard-AI is intended to revolutionize UK innovation across all areas of scientific research
-
‘This is the largest AI ecosystem in the world without its own infrastructure’: Jensen Huang thinks the UK has immense AI potential – but it still has a lot of work to doNews The Nvidia chief exec described the UK as a “fantastic place for VCs to invest” but stressed hardware has to expand to reap the benefits
-
Nvidia GTC 2025: Four big announcements you need to know aboutNews Nvidia GTC 2025, the chipmaker’s annual conference, has dominated the airwaves this week – and it’s not hard to see why.
-
HPE unveils Mod Pod AI ‘data center-in-a-box’ at Nvidia GTCNews Water-cooled containers will improve access to HPC and AI hardware, the company claimed
