A new computer weighs more than 2 cars and needs thousands of liters of water per minute – what can this part do?
A company introduced a new computer. In comparison, any gaming PC should look almost cute. What’s in the computer that weighs more than 3 tons?
The Oak Ridge National Laboratory has presented a superlative computer. It can hardly be compared with our gaming computers in terms of structure or performance. Nevertheless, it’s impressive what’s inside “Frontier”.
New computer weighs more than 3 tons and needs 300,000 liters of water per minute
What’s in the computer? Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s computer uses AMD processors. Exactly, Epyc processors with 64 cores are used, which clock at 2 GHz. The computer offers a total of 8,730,112 cores.
On average, processors with 4 to 6 cores are used in many gaming PCs. The computer thus achieves a performance of 1.102 exaflop/s. That’s a number we can hardly imagine, it’s so huge. Flops describes the number of floating point calculations that a processor can do. An exaflop is one trillion floating point calculations per second.
By the way, the computer is presented in the following video:
The developers also write that the computer weighs more than 30,000 kilograms and requires around 300,000 liters of water per minute for cooling. In comparison: Gaming PCs rarely weigh more than 20 kg and an average of 2 to 3 liters of liquid are used in a computer if they use water cooling.
Frontier needs 7,300 square feet of space, and that’s not exactly small. A normal soccer field (68m x 105m) has an area of 7140 square meters.
A gaming PC that you can stand on legs on your desk requires significantly less space. You can read in our article whether you really want this and what the part costs in the end:
Your next gaming PC stands on its feet, costs €2000 and doesn’t need an extra monitor
Such supercomputers are only used professionally
What do you need so much computing power for? Such supercomputers or high-performance PCs have different areas of responsibility. Such devices are mainly used in research, where the power is needed for simulations, for example.
The power is used, for example, for weather forecasts, for the discovery of oil and gas deposits or for complex calculations in astrophysics or fusion research.
The fastest gaming PC in the world can do 100 kilometers per hour
Reference-mein-mmo.de