Frontier, an Oak Ridge supercomputer, is now the fastest on earth. Here's why it is astounding

The new Frontier supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee was just declared to be fastest computer in the world.

The Frontier supercomputer was built last year by Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Cray, a high-performance computing company, using AMD processors. Frontier will be used for high-powered scientific modeling.

Supercomputers are high-performance machines built for solving complex scientific or mathematical problems. A supercomputer can run complex software to simulate diverse problems from weather, molecular interactions and nuclear reactions.

The announcement of the world's fastest title was made in Hamburg, Germany, at the ISC High Performance conference.

Here's a look at what the supercomputer that's housed in our backyard means to the world.

How fast is the Frontier supercomputer?

Frontier is the first supercomputing system known to break the exaflop barrier. During a test, Frontier ran at 1.1 exaflops and could go as high as 2 exaflops.

FLOPS means "floating point operations per second," a measure of how many math problems a computer can solve in a second.

"Exa" is a prefix that you typically only see in astronomy referring to absurdly large numbers. Exa is 10 raised to the 18th power. It's 1,000,000,000,000,000,000.

In translation, one exasecond is roughly 32 billion years.

This means that Frontier is theoretically capable of running 2 quadrillion calculations a second.

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How much faster is Frontier compared to its predecessor?

The new rating means Frontier is 10 times more powerful than the previous supercomputer built by Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

It can run problems that require 10 times the computing power or run 10 times the number of concurrent projects than the previous supercomputer at Oak Ridge, Summit, which was the fastest super computer on earth in 2018.

"It's an incredible thing to have an order of magnitude enhancement in performance," said Jack Dongarra, a University of Tennessee at Knoxville distinguished professor of computer science. "Instead of spending a day on a problem, you can get results in a couple of hours."

Frontier is a successful experiment

The Frontier supercomputer is a sophisticated piece of technology that is on the bleeding edge of what computers are capable of doing.

Building and running a computer like this isn't like running a home computer. Dongarra told Knox News that everything from the hardware to the software had to be designed specifically for the project.

Who can use Frontier?

Now that Frontier has been shown to work, scientists at Oak Ridge will spend several months tweaking it before making it available for researchers to use.

What is Frontier used for?

Dongarra anticipates that drug discovery, climate change, combustion engine modeling and nuclear science will all eventually get computer time on Frontier.

What other American science facilities have supercomputers?

Two more computers of this kind are being built by the Department of Energy at Argonne National Laboratory outside Chicago and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California.

What other countries have supercomputers?

While Frontier is the first computer to "take the brass ring" for this scale of computing, it might not be alone.

Chinese scientists won the Gordon Bell Prize, considered the Nobel Prize of Supercomputing, for simulating quantum computing on a supercomputer called Sunway.

The team conducted a simulation that would have taken the Google Sycamore quantum processor 10,000 years in 304 seconds. The Google Sycamore is an experimental quantum computer that outperformed the Summit system in 2019.

The Sunway isn't alone. China also has a new supercomputer called the Tianhe-3.

So far neither the Sunway nor the Tianhe-3 have submitted stats to the Top 500 list, so we don't know what their max performance is.

It's possible we may find out this year how fast they are. The Top 500 will release an updated list this November at the ACM/IEEE Supercomputing Conference in Dallas.

This article originally appeared on Knoxville News Sentinel: Frontier supercomputer ranked fastest on earth, breaks exaflop barrier