The world’s first exascale supercomputer is not only the world’s most powerful but it is also the most efficient. The Frontier, developed by the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, America’s designated supercomputer facility, is the world’s first supercomputer to exceed a performance margin of 1 exaflop. With this, the supercomputer has overtaken the Fugaku belonging to Japan’s RIKEN Center for Computational Science as the world’s most powerful supercomputer.
Frontier’s closest competitor, Fugaku, has a performance score of 442 petaflops on the Linpack benchmark – a standard for officially ranking global, publicly disclosed supercomputers. While the Fugaku was based on Arm’s original designs, the US Frontier is powered by AMD.
Interestingly, Frontier is also said to be the most power efficient supercomputer ever built. According to reports, the power consumption rating of the Frontier is 52.2 gigaflops per watt. This score surpassed that of the most efficient supercomputer ever built, the Preferred Networks MN-3, which offered 39.4 gigaflops per watt in power rating.
The latest list of the world’s top 500 supercomputers is to be unveiled in Germany in the coming days, and is believed to be the ‘official’ list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers.
Certainly, Frontier is designed to be the first ‘true’ exascale supercomputer. The latter is a reference to traditional supercomputers (i.e. computing systems built on quantum computing principles) that offer performance capabilities of greater than 1 xflop. While Japan’s Fugaku was billed as the first exascale supercomputer, the Frontier can apply its peak, 1.1-exaflop computing power to real-world tasks, not just benchmarks.
In its previous list of November 2021, India’s highest ranking in the supercomputer list was with Param Siddhi-AI at 102nd position. The latter belongs to India’s Center for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) – offering a peak performance of 3.3 petaflops on the Linpack benchmark scale.
Interestingly, traditional supercomputing stands at a point where it is set to advance even further in its performance capabilities – making exflop-scale performance more regular among supercomputers, and approaching zetascale computing. However, it is tipped to make way for the early stages of quantum computing, which could take high-performance computing to the next level.