The world’s fastest supercomputer is called Frontier, and it is located at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility in Tennessee, United States. Frontier was built by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and AMD, and it became operational in 2022. Frontier is the first and only exascale supercomputer, which means it can perform more than a billion billion operations per second (an exaflop). Frontier achieved an Rmax of 1.102 exaflops, which is 1.102 quintillion operations per second, using AMD CPUs and GPUs.
Frontier is a remarkable achievement of engineering and science, as it can process vast amounts of data very quickly and draw key insights from it. Frontier is used for various scientific research and development projects, such as climate change, medicine, nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence, and more. Frontier can help us understand complex phenomena, discover new materials, design better drugs, and solve challenging problems.
Frontier consists of 9,472 AMD Epyc 7453s “Trento” 64 core 2 GHz CPUs and 37,888 Radeon Instinct MI250X GPUs. Each node has one CPU, four GPUs, and four terabytes of flash memory. The system has coherent interconnects between CPUs and GPUs, allowing GPU memory to be accessed coherently by code running on the Epyc CPUs. Frontier occupies 74 rack cabinets and has a total of 145 km of cabling. Frontier is liquid-cooled, allowing five times the density of air-cooled architectures.
Frontier consumes 21 megawatts (MW) of power, which is comparable to the electricity used by a small city. However, Frontier is also very efficient, as it topped the Green500 list for most efficient supercomputer in June 2022 with 62.86 gigaflops/watt. Frontier uses an internal flash storage system with 75 TB/s read and 35 TB/s write speeds, as well as the Orion site-wide Lustre filesystem with 700 PB capacity.
Frontier is the world’s fastest supercomputer as of March 2023, according to the TOP500 list. It is three times faster than the second-fastest supercomputer, Fugaku, which is located in Japan. Frontier is also seven times faster than its predecessor, Summit, which was also hosted at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Frontier is expected to remain the world’s fastest supercomputer for the foreseeable future, as no other system has announced plans to surpass its performance.
Frontier is a testament to the power and potential of supercomputing. It represents a milestone in human history, as it enables us to explore new frontiers of knowledge and innovation. Frontier is not just a machine, but a tool for advancing science and humanity.