The US has succeeded in developing the world's first exascale supercomputer, fulfilling a promise made by President Obama seven years ago.
The petascale is where most of the world's fastest supercomputers are located. A quintillion operations per second is reached by the exascale.
The Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Frontier computer has become the world's first known supercomputer to demonstrate a processor speed of 1.1 exaFLOPS.
The result was confirmed in a test. The Oak Ridge lab says that the ultimate limits of Frontier are even more amazing, with the computer theoretically capable of a peak performance of 2 quintillion calculations per second.
It's the standardized HPL benchmark that matters most at the TOP500, a twice-yearly ranking of the world's most powerful supercomputers, and Frontier's debut score means it's now ranked as the world's fastest system.
"With an exact HPL score of 1.102 exaFLOPS, Frontier is not only the most powerful supercomputer to ever exist, but it's also the first true exascale machine," the announcement of the new rankings says.
The distributed computing project Folding@ home broke the exascale barrier in 2020. Frontier is the first exascale machine because the calculations weren't spread across many computers.
Computer scientists have been building towards the exascale milestone for years now, with the threshold representing a new level of computational power for calculating solutions to very complex problems.
The progress in the field has been as fast as the computers themselves. In the last two years, the Japanese machine Fugaku has been the top machine.
That was almost three times better than the machine it ousted from the top spot, the IBM-built Summit.
Summit has been demoted to fourth position on the TOP500 list with a new score of 148.6 petaFLOPS, far behind the performance of Frontier, Fugaku, and newcomer LUMI.
In terms of exascale performance, only Frontier has achieved true exascale performance.
The system is called an exascale machine due to the fact that Fugaku's theoretical peak is above the one exaFLOP barrier.
The only system that can demonstrate this is Frontier.
The omission of new Chinese supercomputers from the top500 list is an elephant in the room.
We don't know how they will compare to this year's ranked systems, although Chinese systems have done well in previous years' rankings, and some believe China may have several exascale systems in the future.
Frontier's accomplishment is not taken away from. The most advanced computer on the planet is poised to tell us a lot.
"Frontier is a new era of exascale computing that will solve the world's biggest scientific challenges," says ORNL director ThomasZacharia.
Frontier has an unparalleled capability as a tool for scientific discovery.
You can find more about Frontier here and the rankings for June 2022.
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