The Dept of Energy at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory has fired up its latest supercomputer, Frontier. Three years in the making, it is the first to officially manage exascale computing—10^18 64- bit floating-point calculations per second (an ExaFLOP)—and has a theoretical peak performance of two ExaFLOPS. The magic is worked by a combination of HP’s Cray architecture, 9,472 AMD Epyc 64C CPUs, 37,888 GPUs, and 700 petabytes of storage.
Frontier may not hold the crown for long. The Intel-powered Aurora (another DOE Oak Ridge project) should start testing soon, ready for deployment next year. It was due to be the first exascale supercomputer but was hit by delays in Intel’s 7nm chips. –CL