Frontier: The world’s fastest supercomputer with AMD hardware

High Performance Computing (HPC) offers “super machines” that power large servers and serve other specific applications that need very high processing speed and large memory capacity.

The My Godwho also works in this segment, this week highlighted Frontier, a system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), located in Tennessee, in the United States, that is described as the world’s fastest supercomputer.

AMD’s claim is based on the latest releases of the Top500 and Green500 ratings, which ranks machines in this segment. Frontier scored 1.1 exaflops, becoming the first supercomputer To break the exascale barrier.

Frontier’s performance is more than twice that of the second system and greater than the sum of the next seven systems in the Top500 list. The equipment was also praised for having good energy efficiency.

Tests showed that Frontier delivers 62.68 gigaflops/watt of energy efficiency Single chassis of 3rd generation AMD EPYC processors and accelerators with AMD Instinct MI250x GPU.

The device is also the world’s fastest artificial intelligence system with a mark of 6.86 exaflops in the HPL-AI standard, equivalent to executing 68 million commands per second in each of the brain’s 86 billion neurons.

Frontier was able to deliver all that performance thanks to 9408 AMD Trento 64-core processorsand accompanies each slide 512GB DDR4 RAM and four AMD Radeon Instinct MI250X GPUs.

Altogether, the system has 602,112 processing cores and 4.6 petabytes of RAM. The MI250X has a total GPU core of 8138240 and a total HBM graphics memory of 4.6 petabytes, with 128GB per GPU.

a The system is water-cooled and consumes more than 22000 liters To keep components at the correct operating temperature. Ability Storage capacity 700 petabytes With a maximum data transfer speed of 75 TB/sec.

at the moment, 5 of the top 10 PCs in the ranking use EPYC processors from AMD, with Frontier at the top. However, Intel plans to overtake it with the Aurora, a device that promises up to 2 exaflops and should be up and running by the end of the year or 2023.