The world's fastest supercomputer resides at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and counts as the first true exascale machine with an HPL score of 1.102 exaflops/second.
The Frontier supercomputer was announced as the fastest supercomputer today in the 59th TOP500 list(Opens in a new window). It uses Hewlett Packard Enterprise's (HPE) Cray EX platform, and consists of 74 purpose-built cabinets. Contained within them are 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 for a total core count of 8,730,112.
The huge amount of processing performance achieved equates to 52.23 gigaflops/watt and more than 1 quintillion calculations per second. That's combined with 700 petabytes of storage and HPE Slingshot high-performance Ethernet for data transfers.
In order to cool the system, HPE pumps 6,000 gallons of water through Frontier's cabinets every minute using four 350-horsepower pumps.
To put this performance leap 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 a HPL benchmark of just 442 petaflops/second compared to Frontier's 1.1 exaflops/second. Fugaku also offers nearly three times the processing power of the supercomputer in third place.
Frontier has a theoretical peak performance of 2 exaflops, and ORNL Director Thomas Zacharia says it will be put to very good use(Opens in a new window):
"Frontier is ushering in a new era of exascale computing to solve the world’s biggest scientific challenges. This milestone offers just a preview of Frontier’s unmatched capability as a
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