Frontier is the first supercomputer capable of an exaflop: a billion times a billion calculations per second.
The world’s first exascale computer has been built at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the US state of Tennessee. That is a computer that can perform a billion times a billion calculations per second.
An average laptop is only capable of a few teraflops, or a trillion calculations per second, which is a million times less than an exaflop. The exaflop machine, called Frontier, can help solve complex scientific problems. Think of accurate climate modelling, simulation of nuclear fusion and the discovery of new medicines.
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“Frontier will provide modeling and simulation capabilities at the highest level of computing performance,” said Thomas Zacharia of Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Great achievements, great efforts
The Frontier computer system is housed in 74 separate cases, consisting of 9,400 CPUs, or computer processors, and 37,000 GPUs. These are processors that are designed for 3D graphics, but can also be used for other tasks.
This means that the machine has a total of 8,730,112 cores capable of parallel computing tasks; an average laptop has between five and nine. At peak power, the computer generates so much heat that four powerful pumps are needed to push more than 25,000 liters of water around the machine every minute.
The exaflop performance makes Frontier the number one in the TOP500, an international partnership that ranks the world’s most powerful supercomputers. Its computing power is even as big as a quarter of the computing power of the entire list combined.
“One machine is capable of 25 percent of the total performance of the entire list, so it’s a very, very impressive feat,” says Simon McIntosh-Smithcomputer scientist at the University of Bristol.
Doubling in computing power
Frontier is not finished yet. In the coming months and years, when the software is optimized, it could theoretically peak at two exaflops.
In the past, milestones in supercomputing in a short time to many more machines with comparable capacities. While several exascalers are planned for the next few years, it’s still unclear how widespread this technology could become.
“The pace of improvements in electronics has slowed somewhat, so we don’t expect exascale machines to spread through the TOP500 as quickly as they did with petascale, for example,” says McIntosh-Smith, referring to machines with one-thousandth of the capabilities. from Frontier.