ORNL’s Frontier Reports 1 Exaflop

This spring the US Oak Ridge National Lab reports that the new supercomputer, Frontier, has achieved more than Exaflop computation, which puts them at the top of the Top 500 [2].

Phew!    

OK, this particular achievement is almost as psychological as technical.  I mean, .99 Exaflop would still be on the Top500, and double the score of #2, but getting to the round number feels so much more impressive!

This summer, Charles Q. Choi drools over the “beating heart” of Frontier in IEEE Spectrum [1].  She’s a big girl, with about 9 million processors, kilometers of cables, and a massive water cooling system.

“In total, Frontier contains 9,408 CPUs, 37,632 GPUs, and 8,730,112 cores, linked together by 145 kilometers of networking cables.”

[1]

The only way to get to this level of performance is to be extremely energy efficient, so it’s no coincidence that Frontier is also at the top of the Green500, claiming 68 gigaflops per watt, with a total power suck of 21 megawatts.  This power savings comes from every part of the system, including the interconnection network and the cooling system.

But how did they get so much speed—how useful will it be?

Choi gives us a lot of juicy deets about the fancy chips used, as well as features such as “128 gigabytes of high-bandwidth memory soldered onto [each GPU].” (!)  Part of the magic, of course, is the fast and flexible interconnect, which I’m sure I don’t understand without a lot more exploration.  I know what it is for (oh, boy! Do I know what it is for) but I don’t know how it works.

How useful will it be?  One reason the system is so complicated is that it needs to support multiple kinds of computation.  Some applications will use different parts of the system more than others, and some apps will work better than others on the system. 

It will take work to get things working as well as possible, but I’m very confident that ORNL knows what they are doing.  For one thing, they’ve done it before.

Well done, all.

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1. Charles Q. Choi, The Beating Heart of the World’s First Exascale Supercomputer, in IEEE Spectrum – Computing, June 24, 2022. https://spectrum.ieee.org/frontier-exascale-supercomputer
2. Sara Shoemaker, Frontier supercomputer debuts as world’s fastest, breaking exascale barrier in Oak Ridge National Laboratory – News, May 30, 2022. https://www.ornl.gov/news/frontier-supercomputer-debuts-worlds-fastest-breaking-exascale-barrier