AMD-powered Frontier is now the world's fastest supercomputer, breaks exascale barrier

The Frontier supercomputer, powered by AMD EPYC CPUs, has achieved the title for being the world's most powerful supercomputer. The supercomputer is based at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. With a power of 1.102 exaflops, Frontier's performance is more than double the previous record holder, Fugaku. With such performance, it becomes the first machine to officially break the exascale barrier.

Forrest Norrod, senior vice president and general manager, Data Center Solutions Group, AMD, said in a press statement:

“We are excited that AMD EPYC processors and AMD Instinct accelerators power the world’s fastest, most energy efficient, and first supercomputer to break the exascale barrier.

Innovation and delivering more performance and efficiency for supercomputers is critical to addressing the world's most complex challenges. AMD EPYC processors and AMD Instinct accelerators continue to push the envelope in high performance computing, providing the performance needed to advance scientific discoveries.”

The supercomputer not only performs exceptionally well, but is also the most power efficient, delivering 62.68 gigaflops/watt power-efficiency from a single cabinet of optimized 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors and AMD Instinct MI250x accelerators.

The networking is done by HPE Slingshot-11 interconnect technology that is designed explicitly for accelerating high performance computing (HPC) workloads.

AMD says that it is leading the way in HPC by enabling partners and customers to deploy all sizes of clusters. These range across key research areas including manufacturing, life sciences, financial services, climate research, and more. One such example is how Thailand's National Science and Technology Development Agency is using its supercomputer to advance research in medicine, weather forecasting, and more.

Next up for Frontier is continued testing and validation of the system till later 2022. The supercomputer will be open to a limited number of researchers by the end of the year and will be launched publicly in 2023.