The fastest supercomputer in the world resides in the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) of the Department of Energy and has the first true exoscale machine with an HPL score of 1,102 exaflops / second.
The Frontier supercomputer has been announced today as the fastest supercomputer in the 59th TOP500 list (Opens in new window). It uses the Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) Cray EX platform and consists of 74 specifically designed cabinets. It includes a mix of AMD EPYC 64C 2GHz processors and AMD Instinct 250X professional GPUs. In total, there are more than 9,400 CPUs and 37,000 GPUs with a total number of cores of 8,730,112.
The large amount of processing performance achieved is equivalent to 52.23 gigaflops / watt and more than 1 quintile of calculations per second. This is combined with 700 petabytes of storage and high-performance Ethernet HPE Slingshot for data transfer.
To cool the system, HPE pumps 6,000 gallons of water through Frontier cabinets every minute using four 350-horsepower pumps.
To put this performance jump in context, the previous fastest supercomputer is the Fugaku system installed at the RIKEN Center for Computational Science (R-CCS) in Kobe, Japan. It contains 7,630,848 cores and has an HPL benchmark of only 442 petaflops / second compared to Frontier’s 1.1 exaflops / second. Fugaku also offers almost three times the processing power of the third-party supercomputer.
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Frontier has a theoretical maximum yield of 2 exaflops, and the director of ORNL, Thomas Zacharia, says that it will be used very well (Opens in new window):
“Frontier is ushering in a new era of exascale computing to meet the world’s greatest scientific challenges. This milestone provides just a preview of Frontier’s unparalleled ability as a tool for scientific discovery. decades of collaboration between national countries: laboratories, academia and private industry, including the DOE’s Exascale IT project, which is deploying the applications, software technologies, hardware and integration needed to ensure the ‘impact on the escalator’.
ORNL is currently conducting Frontier testing and validation, and early access to science in the system is expected by the end of the year. Full access to science will begin early next year.
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