According to the Top500 ranking of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, Frontier, a supercomputer developed using Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) architecture and equipped with Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) processors, outperformed Fugaku to become the world’s fastest supercomputer.
World’s first to break the exascale speed barrier
The supercomputer, built for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), has reached Linmark benchmark score of 1.1 exaflops, making it the world’s first supercomputer to break the exascale speed barrier. Fugaku, installed at the RIKEN Center for Computational Science in Kobe, Japan, has a Linmark benchmark score of 442 petaflops (1 exaflop is equivalent to 1,000 petaflops).
“Frontier is a first-of-its-kind system envisioned by technologists, scientists, and researchers to unleash a new level of potential to offer open science, AI (artificial intelligence), and other breakthroughs that will benefit humanity,” said Justin Hotard, EVP and GM, HPC & AI, HPE.
Help in modelling and simulation of complicated scientific studies
The supercomputer will aid in modelling and simulation of complicated scientific studies in the biological, physical, and chemical sciences. According to HPE, it can be used to create AI models that are 4.5 times faster and 8 times larger, allowing for more data to be trained, increasing predictability and shortening time-to-discovery.
Fugaku is the second most powerful supercomputer
Frontier has 8,730,112 total cores and is built on the latest HPE Cray EX235a architecture and powered with AMD EPYC 64C 2GHz processors. Fugaku, now the second-most powerful supercomputer, has 7,630,848 cores.
According to the 59th edition of the Top500 list, the top two systems are followed by a new LUMI system installed at the EuroHPC centre at CSC in Finland (151.9 petaflops); Summit, an IBM-built system at ORNL in Tennessee (148.8 petaflops); and Sierra, a system at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the United States (94.6 petaflops).
Frontier is also a no. 1 most energy-efficient supercomputer
Frontier is also ranked number one as the world’s most energy-efficient supercomputer, on the Green500 list, which measures supercomputing energy use and efficiency, with 52.23 gigaflops performance per watt, making it 32% more energy-efficient compared to the previous number one system, according to HPE.
The most powerful supercomputer in the world is expected to reach even higher levels of speed with a theoretical peak performance of 2 exaflops.
