HPE’s Frontier becomes the first supercomputer to break the exascale speed barrier

Hewlett Packard Enterprise has announced that Frontier, a new supercomputer that HPE built for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), has reached 1.1 exaflops, making it the world’s first supercomputer to break the exascale speed barrier. It also happens to be the world’s fastest supercomputer, according to the Top500 list of world’s most powerful supercomputers.

In addition to Frontier, three more HPE-built systems are named to the top 10 of the Top500 list, including the LUMI supercomputer for the CSC – IT Center for Science in Finland at number three, Perlmutter supercomputer for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at number seven, and the Adastra supercomputer for GENCI-CINES at number ten.

As the most powerful supercomputer in the world, delivering unprecedented performance and advanced capabilities, Frontier will speed up discoveries, make breakthroughs, and address the world’s toughest challenges. The supercomputer, which is more powerful than the next top seven of the world’s largest supercomputers, will allow scientists to model and simulate at an exascale level to solve problems that are 8X more complex, up to 10X faster. Frontier is also expected to reach even higher levels of speed with a theoretical peak performance of 2 exaflops.

The supercomputer will have significant impact in critical areas such as cancer and disease diagnosis and prognosis, drug discovery, renewable energy, and new materials to create safer and sustainable products.

“Today’s debut of the Frontier exascale supercomputer delivers a breakthrough of speed and performance, and will give us the opportunity to answer questions we never knew to ask,” said Justin Hotard, executive vice president and general manager, HPC & AI, at HPE. “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. 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.”

Frontier is built with HPE Cray EX supercomputers that deliver end-to-end capabilities of compute, accelerated compute, software, storage and networking to support the magnitude of exascale performance.

The new exascale supercomputer, which is more powerful than the world’s next seven largest supercomputers combined, is dedicated to open science, allowing researchers, scientists, and engineers from a variety of public and private institutions, to leverage Frontier.