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Publication Date
12 September 2022

Frontier Supercomputer Breaks Exascale Barrier

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Frontier supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Photo courtesy of Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Hewlett Packard.
Description

The world’s first and fastest supercomputer, Frontier, built by HPE for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), has reached 1.1 exaflops, breaking the exascale speed barrier (a threshold of a quintillion calculations per second), and ranking number one on the Top500 list of world’s most powerful supercomputers. Notably, it is ranked as the world’s most energy-efficient supercomputer on the Green500 list, which rates energy use and efficiency by commercially available supercomputing systems, with Frontier delivering 62.68 gigaflops performance per watt.

Frontier features a theoretical peak performance of 2 exaflops, or two quintillion calculations per second, making it ten times more powerful than ORNL’s Summit system. It consists of 74 HPE Cray EX supercomputer cabinets, which include more than 9,400 AMD-powered nodes and 90 miles of networking cables. Each node contains one optimized EPYC™ processor and four AMD Instinct™ accelerators for more than 9,400 CPUs and more than 37,000 GPUs in the entire system. Check Figure 1 for other fun facts about Frontier.

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