Alex Wilkins
The computer is called the Frontier.
Carlos Jones is an employee of the U.S. Dept. of Energy.
The world's first exascale computer, capable of performing a billion billion operations per second, was built by Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
A laptop is only capable of a few trillion operations per second, which is a million times less. Accurate climate modelling, nuclear fusion simulation and drug discovery could be solved with the help of the exaflop machine, called Frontier.
Modelling and simulation capabilities at the highest level of computing performance will be offered by Frontier.
The Frontier computing system is housed in 74 separate cabinets, each containing 9400 standard computer processors and 37,000 graphics processing units, which are designed to render 3D graphics but can also be used for a range of other tasks.
A typical laptop has between five and nine cores and the machine has a total of 8,730,112. Four high-powered pumps are needed to push more than 25,000 litres of water around the machine each minute, because the computer is generating so much heat.
The performance of Frontier makes it the number one most powerful supercomputer in the world, and it also makes it a quarter of the computing power of the entire list.
One machine represents 25 per cent of the total performance of the whole list, so it is an impressive achievement, says Simon McIntosh-Smith at the University of Bristol, UK.
The final form of Frontier has yet to be achieved. It could reach a theoretical peak of 2 exaflops over the coming months and years.
Many more machines with similar capabilities have followed the supercomputing milestone in the past. There are several exascale machines planned for the next couple of years, but it isn't clear how widespread this technology will become.
The rate of improvement in electronics has slowed down, so we don't expect exascale machines to come to the TOP500 as quickly as they did for petascale.
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