Frontier at ORNL now world's fastest computer
The Frontier supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory has earned the top ranking as the world’s fastest on the 59th TOP500 list, with 1.1 exaflops of performance.
The system is the first to achieve an unprecedented level of computing performance known as exascale, a threshold of a quintillion calculations per second.
Frontier features a theoretical peak performance of two exaflops, or two quintillion calculations per second, making it 10 times more powerful than the Summitt supercomputer.
"The system leverages ORNL’s extensive expertise in accelerated computing and will enable scientists to develop critically needed technologies for the country’s energy, economic and national security, helping researchers address problems of national importance that were impossible to solve just five years ago," a news release stated.
“Frontier is ushering in a new era of exascale computing to solve the world’s biggest scientific challenges,” ORNL Director Thomas Zacharia stated in the release. “This milestone offers just a preview of Frontier’s unmatched capability as a tool for scientific discovery. It is the result of more than a decade of collaboration among the national laboratories, academia and private industry, including DOE’s Exascale Computing Project, which is deploying the applications, software technologies, hardware and integration necessary to ensure impact at the exascale.”
Rankings were announced at the International Supercomputing Conference 2022 in Hamburg, Germany, which gathers leaders from around the world in the field of high-performance computing, or HPC. Frontier’s speeds surpassed those of any other supercomputer in the world, including ORNL’s Summit, which is also housed at ORNL’s Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science user facility.
This article originally appeared on Oakridger: Frontier supercomputer debuts as world’s fastest
