Once again America is the home of the world’s fastest supercomputer. In the latest Top500 leaderboard, Frontier supercomputer grabbed the first position with a score of 1.102 exaflops. Frontier also became the first supercomputer to surpass the exaflop barrier. The former champion was Fugaku from Japan with 442 petaflops, which means Frontier almost tripled its performance.
1.102 exaflops
Frontier is located at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and it is powered by 3rd generation AMD EPYC server CPUs and Instinct MI250x accelerators. The supercomputer has 8,730,112 cores. The system uses HPE’s Slingshot-11 interconnect solution, which is designed for HPC workloads.
Although Frontier is currently on top of the Top500 list, it may not be the fastest or the first to break the exaflop barrier. Top500 is a list that is based on submissions. There are various online sources that claim that China has multiple exascale class supercomputers in 2021, but decided not to declare them. Thus currently it is impossible to be 100% sure that Frontier is the fastest at the moment. Forrest Norrod, SVP and GM for data center solutions at AMD said,
« We are excited that AMD EPYC processors and Instinct accelerators now power the world’s fastest, most energy efficient, and first supercomputer to break the exascale barrier. Innovation and delivering more performance and efficiency for supercomputers is critical to addressing the world’s most complex challenges. AMD EPYC processors and Instinct accelerators continue to push the envelope in HPC, providing the performance needed to advance scientific discoveries. »