Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced that Frontier, a new supercomputer that HPE built for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), has reached 1.1 exaflops, making it the world’s first supercomputer to break the exascale speed barrier, and the world’s fastest supercomputer, according to the Top500 list of world’s most powerful supercomputers.
Frontier also ranked number one in a category, called mixed-precision computing, that rates performance in formats commonly used for artificial intelligence, with a performance of 6.88 exaflops. Additionally, the new supercomputer claimed the number one spot on the Green500 list as the world’s most energy efficient supercomputer with 52.23 gigaflops performance per watt, making it 32% more energy efficient compared to the previous number one system.3
In addition to Frontier, three more HPE-built systems are named to the top 10 of the Top500 list, including the LUMI supercomputer for the CSC – IT Center for Science in Finland at number three, Perlmutter supercomputer for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at number seven, and the Adastra supercomputer for GENCI-CINES at number ten.
ORNL’s Frontier to solve problems that are 8X more complex, up to 10X faster
As the most powerful supercomputer in the world, delivering unprecedented performance and advanced capabilities, Frontier will speed up discoveries, make breakthroughs, and address the world’s toughest challenges. The supercomputer, which is more powerful than the next top seven of the world’s largest supercomputers, will allow scientists to model and simulate at an exascale level to solve problems that are 8X more complex, up to 10X faster.2 Frontier is also expected to reach even higher levels of speed with a theoretical peak performance of 2 exaflops.
Justin Hotard, executive vice president and general manager, HPC & AI, at HPE, said, “Today’s debut of the Frontier exascale supercomputer delivers a breakthrough of speed and performance, and will give us the opportunity to answer questions we never knew to ask,” “Frontier is a first-of-its-kind system that was envisioned by technologists, scientists and researchers to unleash a new level of capability to deliver open science, AI and other breakthroughs, that will benefit humanity. We are proud of this moment, which continues the United States’ leadership in supercomputing, now including exascale, made possible by the ongoing public and private partnership between the U.S. Department of Energy, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, HPE, and AMD.”
