1.1 quintillion operations per second: US has world’s quickest supercomputer

Excessive 500 supercomputer rating —

With inch of 1.1 exaflop/s, DOE design at Oak Ridge lab leads Excessive 500 itemizing.

Jon Brodkin

A systems engineer stands in a large room containing the Frontier supercomputer.

Amplify / Programs engineer Matt Ezell, the design lead for the Frontier supercomputer at Oak Ridge Nationwide Laboratory.

The US has retaken the top set up on this planet supercomputer rankings with the exascale Frontier design at Oak Ridge Nationwide Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee.

The Frontier design’s receive of 1.102 exaflop/s makes it “essentially the most extremely environment friendly supercomputer to ever exist” and “the primary factual exascale machine,” the Excessive 500 mission mentioned Monday within the announcement of its most conventional rankings. Exaflop/s (or exaflops) is quick for 1 quintillion floating-level operations per second.

Frontier turned greater than twice as quick as a Jap design that positioned second within the rankings, which might be in accordance to the LINPACK benchmark that measures the “efficiency of a devoted design for fixing a dense design of linear equations.”

“Based totally totally on essentially the most conventional HPE Cray EX235a construction and outfitted with AMD EPYC 64C 2GHz processors, the design has 8,730,112 full cores, a vitality effectivity rating of 52.23 gigaflops/watt, and depends on gigabit Ethernet for data switch,” the Excessive 500 neighborhood mentioned. Frontier “is in the intervening time being built-in and examined on the ORNL in Tennessee, USA, the place it will be operated by the Division of Vitality,” the neighborhood mentioned.

Even when China could maybe per probability even include cracked the exaflop barrier, the US design is the primary to include demonstrated the inch in authentic Excessive 500 testing.

Frontier moreover tops effectivity rating

Frontier turned moreover the second-most ambiance marvelous supercomputer within the modern Inexperienced 500 rankings. The tip set up in Inexperienced 500 turned taken by a smaller model of the Frontier design at Oak Ridge, one with 120,832 cores in should the 8.7 million within the exascale design.

Taking second set up of residing within the Excessive 500 with a receive of 442 petaflop/s turned the outdated prime supercomputer, the Fugaku design on the RIKEN Heart for Computational Science in Kobe, Japan. Whereas the Fugaku design has a theoretical peak above 1 exaflop/s, Frontier is the simplest design that has demonstrated it in Excessive 500 testing, the Excessive 500 announcement mentioned. ORNL mentioned that Frontier’s theoretical peak is 2 exaflop/s.

Fugaku turned in first set up of residing beginning with the June 2020 rating and stayed on prime in November 2020, June 2021, and November 2021. The US had closing held first set up of residing within the twice-yearly rankings in November 2019 when Oak Ridge’s IBM-constructed Summit design posted a receive of 148.6 petaflop/s.

DOE’s exascale mission

The DOE in 2018 introduced a $1.8 billion mission to come back by not lower than two exascale supercomputers to toughen a unfold of scientific research.

“The work to inform, set up and try Frontier began during the COVID-19 pandemic, as shutdowns around the globe strained worldwide current chains,” ORNL mentioned this week. “Additional than 100 contributors of a public-non-public group labored across the clock, from sourcing a whole lot and a whole lot of elements to creating sure deliveries of design elements on time prohibit to fastidiously putting in and testing 74 HPE Cray EX supercomputer cupboards, which consist of larger than 9,400 AMD-powered nodes and 90 miles of networking cables.”

Researchers will “affect come by entry to to the totally operational Frontier design later this yr,” ORNL affiliate lab director Jeff Nichols mentioned, including that it will be readily available to “scientists and engineers from around the globe.”

“Frontier customers will mannequin the ultimate lifespan of a nuclear reactor, dispute sickness genetics, and assemble on modern traits in science and expertise to additional combine artificial intelligence with data analytics and modeling and simulation,” ORNL moreover mentioned.

HPCwire’s protection of the Excessive 500 itemizing outfitted a additional description of Frontier’s composition:

Frontier comprises 74 cupboards, each weighing in at 8,000 kilos. 9,408 HPE Cray EX nodes are unfold throughout these cupboards, with each node powered by an AMD “Trento” 7A53 Epyc CPU and quadruple AMD Instinct MI250X GPUs (totaling 37,632 GPUs throughout the design). The design has 9.2 petabytes of reminiscence, destroy up evenly between HBM and DDR4, and it makes use of HPE Slingshot-11 networking. It’s supported by 37 petabytes of node-native storage on prime of 716 petabytes of middle-wide storage. The design is 100 p.c liquid-cooled the utilization of heat (85° F) water, and via set up, the ultimate Frontier design occupies 372 sq. meters.

HP Enterprise bought the supercomputing firm Cray in 2019.

China reportedly has exascale supercomputers

There are indications that China has two exascale supercomputers. However operators “of these techniques include not submitted check out outcomes for analysis” within the Excessive 500 rating, per probability because of “tensions between the USA and China,” The New York Instances wrote.

Formally, China’s prime-ranked design is the sixth quickest within the Excessive 500. That design, recognized as Sunway TaihuLight, turned ranked No. 1 4 straight situations in 2016 and 2017 however hasn’t up to date its receive since. One different Chinese language language design referred to as Tianhe-2A held the top set up from 2013 to 2015 and is now ninth.

“There are rumors China has one factor” with exascale vitality, however “there could maybe be nothing authentic,” Jack Dongarra, a pc scientist who designed Linpack, suggested The New York Instances. Dongarra is a professor on the Faculty of Tennessee and holds a location at ORNL.