US Supercomputer 'Frontier' World's First to Surpass Exascale Level, Better Than Top 500 Supercomputers

A new supercomputer was developed and distinguished as the current fastest computing device on the planet. According to reports, the supercomputer could go through formulas at speed reaching 'exascale.'

Supercomputer from US Breaks Exascale, How Fast is It?

The supercomputer was developed by experts from the US Department of Energy, along with their collaboration with various institutes in the country. The device, known as the Frontier supercomputer, was recently crowned at the International Supercomputing Conference 2022 as the world's fastest.

The US energy department worked with Cray Inc in 2019 to begin the development of the supercomputer. Most assemblies were carried out in Tennessee's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). The same facility contains other record-breaking supercomputers, including the Titan and Summit. The latter was the previous fastest computer ever created but was later exceeded by the performances of Japan's Fugaku back in 2020.

The Frontier's processing capacity surpasses even the devices listed under the Top 500 supercomputers. This includes Fugaku, which has a calculating power that reaches 415,00 floating-point operations per second.

The exaflop threshold was beaten by the Frontier supercomputer with its performance of 1.102 quintillion calculations per second, according to measurements through the High-Performance Linpack Benchmark or HPL test.

To ensure data accuracy from the supercomputer, its precision was also measured through the top-notch High-Performance Linpack-Accelerator Introspection or HPL-AI test, allowing experts to see the calculation speeds of devices that have systems constructed with machine learning programs. This separate scale revealed that the Frontier supercomputer operates on a whopping 6.88 exaflops.

ORNL Director Thomas Zacharia explained that Frontier is paving the way for a new, futuristic age of computing, which will allow us to get ahold of impossible information from the most challenging problems in scientific studies.

The milestone that the Frontier machine surpassed demonstrates the device's capability to contribute to many of our scientific discoveries in the future, Zacharia continued.

Further improvements are being conducted for the Frontier computer to sharpen its processing rate. Once perfected, the instrument would be working full-time for experiments next year, New Atlas reports.

Frontier Supercomputer: Specs

The Frontier supercomputer was constructed with 74 HPE Cray EX supercomputer cabinets equipped with more than 37,000 GPUs (graphics processing units) and about 9,400 AMD CPUs (central processing units).

The machine also has 700 petabytes of data storage that allows the system to write at a speed of five terabytes per second and was attached with an eco-friendly liquid cooling system that pumps about 27,700 liters or 6,000 gallons of water throughout its hardware. The total number of its network cables measures 145 kilometers or about 90 miles in length.

After three consecutive years of development, the Frontier supercomputer will be utilized by scientists starting in the last quarter of 2022.

Its exascale capacity would first be applied to projects such as searching for new energy sources, solutions for incurable diseases, observations of stellar explosions, and developing better artificial intelligence-based technologies, Science News reports.

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