Frontier (supercomputer)

Hewlett Packard Enterprise Frontier, or OLCF-5, is the world's first and fastest exascale supercomputer, hosted at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) in Tennessee, United States and first operational in 2022. It is based on the Cray EX and is the successor to Summit (OLCF-4). , Frontier is the world's fastest supercomputer. Frontier achieved an Rmax of 1.102 exaFLOPS, which is 1.102 quintillion operations per second, using AMD CPUs and GPUs. Measured at 62.86 gigaflops/watt, Frontier topped the Green500 list for most efficient supercomputer, until it was dethroned (in efficiency) by Flatiron Institute's Henri supercomputer in November 2022. Frontier uses 9,472 AMD Epyc 7453s "Trento" 64 core 2 GHz CPUs (606,208 cores) and 37,888 Radeon Instinct MI250X GPUs (8,335,360 cores). They can perform double precision operations at the same speed as single precision. "Trento" is an optimized 3rd Gen EPYC CPU ("Milan"), which itself is based on the Zen 3 microarchitecture. It occupies 74 rack cabinets. Each cabinet hosts 64 blades, each consisting of 2 nodes. Blades are interconnected by HPE Slingshot 64-port switch that provides 12.8 terabits/second of bandwidth. Groups of blades are linked in a dragonfly topology with at most three hops between any two nodes. Cabling is either optical or copper, customized to minimize cable length. Total cabling runs . Frontier is liquid-cooled, allowing 5x the density of air-cooled architectures. Each node consists of one CPU, 4 GPUs and 4 terabytes of flash memory. Each GPU has 128 GB of RAM soldered onto it. Frontier has coherent interconnects between CPUs and GPUs, allowing GPU memory to be accessed coherently by code running on the Epyc CPUs. Frontier uses an internal 75 TB/s read / 35 TB/s write / 15 billion IOPS flash storage system, along with the 700 PB Orion site-wide . Frontier consumes 21 megawatts (MW) (compared to its predecessor Summit's 13 MW); it has been estimated that the next US exascale system, Aurora, will consume around 60 MW.