Frontier Exascale Supercomputer (OLCF-5)

The story

Housed in Building 5600 at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, Frontier officially crossed the exascale barrier in May 2022 by calculating 1.1 quintillion mathematical operations per second (1.102 exaflops). Built on HPE Cray EX architecture with 37,888 AMD Instinct MI250X accelerators, Frontier occupies 74 water-cooled cabinets connected by Slingshot-11 optical interconnects. Circulating 6,000 gallons of warm water per minute to cool its processors with no mechanical chillers, Frontier supports scientific breakthroughs in fusion energy, genomics, and nuclear physics.

Notable

• The world's first true exascale computer, reaching 1.102 exaflops on the Top500 Linpack benchmark in May 2022.
• Constructed from 74 HPE Cray EX cabinets housing 37,888 AMD Instinct MI250X GPUs and 9,472 EPYC CPUs.
• Utilizes 100% warm-water liquid cooling circulating four Olympic-sized pools of water through the system daily.
• Topped the Green500 list as the world's most energy-efficient supercomputer while delivering world-record compute.

Expansions

• 2019: DOE awards $600M contract to HPE and AMD to build Frontier at ORNL
• 2022: verified as world's first exascale supercomputer (1.102 exaflops)
• 2024: continues leading global scientific simulations in biology, fusion, and materials