Jane Edwards
Hewlett Packard Enterprise and the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have launched the world’s first exascale supercomputer designed to accelerate discoveries in areas such as disease diagnosis and prognosis, new materials, drug discovery and renewable energy.
The HPE-built Frontier supercomputer reached a performance of 1.1 exaflops, making it the world’s fastest supercomputer based on the Top500 list as of May, and landed the top spot in mixed-precision computing category for achieving a performance of 6.88 exaflops, the company said Monday.
“Frontier is a first-of-its-kind system that was envisioned by technologists, scientists and researchers to unleash a new level of capability to deliver open science, AI and other breakthroughs, that will benefit humanity,” said Justin Hotard, executive vice president and general manager for high performance computing and artificial intelligence at HPE.
“We are proud of this moment, which continues the United States’ leadership in supercomputing, now including exascale, made possible by the ongoing public and private partnership between the U.S. Department of Energy, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, HPE, and AMD,” added Hotard.
Frontier also ranked first on the Green500 list for achieving a power efficiency rating of 52.23 gigaflops per watt and is expected to reach 2 exaflops of peak performance.
The supercomputer consists of 74 HPE Cray EX cabinets, Advanced Micro Devices’ 3rd Gen EPYC processors, AMD Instinct MI250x accelerators, HPE Slingshot networking cables, Cray Clusterstor E1000 storage system and liquid-cooling capabilities.
HPE is also building exascale supercomputers for DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Argonne National Laboratory.
