ORNL's Frontier is now the world's most powerful supercomputer

With 1.1 exaflops, Frontier quite easily defeated Japan's Fugaku

The Frontier supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in the US state of Tennessee has been named the world's most powerful supercomputer in the semi-annual TOP500 ranking of powerful non-distributed computers.

On the Linmark test, the AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer surpassed 1.1 exaflops, or 1.1 quintillion computations per second, the lab announced on Monday.

The previous record was held by Japan's ARM A64X Fugaku system, built by the RIKEN Centre for Computational Science (R-CCS) in Kobe, which reached a peak computing performance of 442 petaflops last year.

Before Fugaku took the title in June 2020, the IBM Summit machine had held the title of world's fastest supercomputer for two years.

The majority of the world's supercomputers are financed, built, and run by governmental organisations. They are used by scientists to simulate physical processes, such as the climate or the structure of the cosmos, while the military uses them for the study and development of weapons.

Frontier is currently being integrated and tested at ORNL, and will eventually be operated by the US Air Force and the US Department of Energy.

This system is based on the newest HPE Cray EX235a architecture and features third-gen AMD EPYC 64C 2GHz processors.

The AMD EPYC processors, optimised for high-performance computing and artificial intelligence, are combined with AMD Instinct 250X accelerators and Slingshot-11 interconnect in the HPE Cray EX architecture.

The system has a total of 8,730,112 cores, and transfers data via gigabit Ethernet.

Frontier is not only the most powerful supercomputer ever built, but it is also the most energy efficient.

At 52.23 gigaflops per watt, the system's test machine, Crusher, also outscored Japan's Preferred Networks MN-3 system to win the top spot on the related GREEN500 ranking.

"The fact that the world ' s fastest machine is also the most energy efficient is just simply amazing," said Thomas Zacharia, lab director at ORNL.

The US was not the only country to make significant gains in TOP500 list.

Finland's LUMI supercomputer slightly edged out America's Summit to earn the number 3 spot with 151.9 petaflops of FP64 performance.

LUMI, which has 1,110,144 cores, is also notable for being Europe's biggest system.

Even though the US now has the fastest supercomputer in the world, China has the most devices in the TOP500 with 173 systems; the number of systems hailing from the US fell from 150 to 126 in the current list.

Last year, rumours circulated that China was secretly operating one or two exascale supercomputers. Researchers disclosed some specifics about the machines in papers, but TOP500 has yet to formally benchmark them.