The world’s most powerful supercomputer is no longer made in Japan, but rather in the United States and powered by AMD hardware.
The Frontier supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory is also the world’s first official exascale supercomputer, with a sustained Linpack run of 1.102 ExaFlop/s.
With its 442 petaflops of performance, Japan’s A64X-based Fugaku system had held the top spot on the Top500 list for the previous two years.
Frontier broke that record with 1.1 ExaFlops in the Linpack FP64 benchmark, despite the fact that the system’s peak performance is rated at 1.69 ExaFlops.
Frontier has some impressive specs: each of its 74 cabinets weighs 8,000 pounds and contains 9,408 HPE Cray EX nodes.
Each node is equipped with an AMD “Trento” 7A53 Epyc CPU, four AMD Radeon Instinct MI250X GPUs, and 512 GB of DDR4 memory. This works out to 602,112 CPU cores and 4.6 petabytes of DDR4 memory.
Furthermore, the 37,888 GPUs have 8,138,240 cores and 4.6 petabytes of HBM memory (128GB per GPU).
The liquid-cooled system also has 37 petabytes of node-local storage, 716 petabytes of center-wide storage, 75 TB/s of throughput, and 15 billion IOPS of performance.
Its power efficiency, 52.23 gigaflops per watt, has also earned it the top spot on the Green500 list.
Because Frontier has taken the first slot, American systems are now ranked first, fourth, fifth, seventh, and eighth in the Top500.
Five of the top ten computers are AMD, while just one is Intel—Tianhe-2A, China’s which is powered by Xeon E5-2692v2 Ivy Bridge CPUs.
Although Frontier is the first official exascale computer, two Chinese machines, Sunway Oceanlite and Tianhe-3 are thought to have broken the 1 ExaFlop barrier, hitting 1.3 ExaFlops in the Linpack benchmark, although the machines have not been submitted to the Top500 list.
To read our blog on “Meta to launch one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers to process its data,” click here.
