Exascale supercomputer: Frontier shatters computing speed records

Frontier, a supercomputer constructed by Oak Ridge Nationwide Laboratory, is the primary laptop able to exaflops – one billion operations per second

By Alex Wilkins

The world’s first large-scale laptop able to performing one billion billion operations per second was constructed by Oak Ridge Nationwide Laboratory in Tennessee.

A typical laptop computer can solely do a number of teraflops, or a trillion operations per second, which is one million instances much less. The exaflop machine, known as Frontier, might assist resolve a bunch of advanced scientific issues, together with correct local weather modeling, nuclear fusion simulation and drug discovery.

“Frontier will ship modeling and simulation capabilities on the highest stage of computing efficiency,” says Thomas Zacharia of Oak Ridge Nationwide Laboratory.

The Frontier computing system is housed in 74 separate cupboards consisting of 9400 CPUs, or commonplace laptop processors, and 37,000 GPUs, processors designed to render 3D graphics however may also be used for a spread of different duties.

Because of this the machine has a complete of 8,730,112 cores able to performing parallel computing duties; between 5 and 9 on a typical laptop computer. At peak energy, the pc generates a lot warmth that it requires 4 high-power pumps to push greater than 25,000 liters of water across the machine each minute.

Frontier’s exaflop efficiency solely Number one in TOP500It is a global collaboration to rank the world’s strongest supercomputers, but it surely additionally represents 1 / 4 of the computing energy of all the checklist.

“One machine represents 25 p.c of the whole efficiency on all the checklist, so this can be a very, very spectacular achievement,” he says. Simon McIntosh-Smith on the College of Bristol in England.

Frontier has not but taken its remaining type. Within the coming months and years, it might theoretically attain a peak of two exaflops when its software program is optimized.

Prior to now, supercomputing milestones had been quickly adopted by many extra machines with related capabilities. Whereas there are a number of large-scale machines deliberate for the following few years, it isn’t clear how widespread this know-how will grow to be.

“The tempo of growth in electronics has slowed a bit, so we do not count on exascale machines to proliferate as quick within the TOP500 as, for instance, for petascale,” says McIntosh-Smith. talents.