World’s first official exaflop supercomputer

On May 30, 2022By Garmin Philip

Top500 computers with AMD EPYC

The “Frontier” is the new number 1 on the list of supercomputers. The computer is the first model to officially break the exaflop limit.

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The frontier in a server room — The “Frontier” of Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

It’s called “Frontier”. new number 1 on the Top500, the list of the world’s officially most powerful supercomputers. The computer is the first to succeed in surpassing the 1 exaflop mark in the Linpack benchmark.

So the “Frontier” is able to do 10¹⁸ FLOPS (Floating Point Operations Per Seconds). With its performance of 1,102 exaflops, the “Frontier” overtakes the previous leader “Fugaku” from Japan, which with 442 petaflops does not even manage half of the floating point calculations. For comparison: Modern top CPUs such as the i9-12900K from Intel are currently in the range of around 600 gigaflops, which corresponds to 0.0000006 exaflops.

The “Frontier” is funded by the US Department of Energy and will in future be available for demanding scientific calculations. The supercomputer from the US Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) contains more than 9000 EPYC 7A53 processors from AMD, each with 64 cores and 37,888 Instinct MI250X accelerators.

Bronson Messer, the director of ORNL: “The Frontier supercomputer, powered by AMD and HPE, represents a tremendous leap forward for both science and the HPC industry. Working with AMD has been critical for us to ensure we are the world’s leading platform for scientific computing The Frontier supercomputer leverages the combined power of enhanced AMD CPUs and AMD Instinct accelerators along with an enhanced AMD ROCm 5 open software platform to give researchers the power they need to conduct scientific research for the benefit of the to carry out for all mankind.”