WPLN News Director Emily Siner and Justin Whitt, director of the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, discussed the Frontier supercomputer on This Is Nashville on June 7. You can listen to the full episode here.
A new supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, called Frontier, has been crowned the fastest in the world — and the first to run at exascale speed.
According to the TOP500 list, which measures supercomputers around the world, the new machine in East Tennessee has performed speeds of up to 1.1 exaflops. That means it can process more than one quintillion calculations per second.
Oak Ridge says this makes Frontier about seven times as fast as the national laboratory’s current supercomputer, called Summit. When Summit launched just four years ago, it too claimed the No. 1 spot, with maximum speeds up to 200 petaflops, but it was quickly surpassed. Now, Summit ranks fourth in the world.
Supercomputers allow for scientists to run complex calculations with massive amounts of data. Researchers used Summit, for example, to simulate exploding stars and better understand how they relate to heavy elements found in the universe, and to identify patterns in human proteins among people with Alzheimer’s.
More: How A Tennessee Supercomputer, Now The World’s Fastest, Might Find New Cures For Cancer (from June 2018)
Frontier will continue this work at even higher speeds, says Thomas Zacharia, the lab director at Oak Ridge.
“As we think about the most compelling challenges facing our generation,” he said in a promotional video last year, “it’s about energy transitions, it’s about climate change, and it’s about issues currently facing our society – tackling the pandemic.”
The creation of Frontier has been a particularly intense process. Scientists have been developing code for exascale computing for years. And the physical installation was hindered by global supply-chain disruptions during the pandemic.
Oak Ridge says scientists will be able to start using Frontier later this year.
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