The Frontier supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory is the first to achieve "exascale", a threshold of a quintillion calculations per second. It has ranked as the world's fastest on the TOP500 list at 1.1 exaflops.

"Frontier, a HPE Cray EX supercomputer, also claimed the number one spot on the Green500 list, which rates energy use and efficiency by commercially available supercomputing systems, with 62.68 gigaflops performance per watt." It also topped a new ranking on "mixed-precision computing, that rates performance in formats commonly used for artificial intelligence, with a performance of 6.88 exaflops."

How did they do it? 74 HPE Cray EX supercomputer cabinets, with each node containing an optimized EPYC processor and four AMD Instinct accelerators, "for a total of more than 9,400 CPUs and more than 37,000 GPUs in the entire system."

In addition, they have a high-performance ethernet system called HPE Slingshot, the world's largest and fastest single parallel file system, based on the Cray ClusterStor E1000 storage system, and local storage devices connected via PCIe Gen4 that provide peak read speeds of 75 terabytes per second, peak write speeds of 35 terabytes per second, and 15 billion random-read input/output operations per second.

Frontier supercomputer debuts as world’s fastest, breaking exascale barrier

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