A supercomputer has officially broken the exascale barrier for the first time.
The US-based Frontier supercomputer has broken the record for world’s most powerful system, new performance data shows. According to the latest edition of the Top500 list, which ranks supercomputers by their HPL benchmark scores, Frontier achieves more than double the performance of the previous record-holder, Fugaku. With a score of 1.102 exaflops, Frontier also becomes the first machine to officially surpass the exascale barrier. Based at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Frontier is powered by a combination of third-generation AMD EPYC server CPUs and Instinct MI250x accelerators, packing a total of 8.7 million cores. The networking is taken care of by HPE’s Slingshot-11 interconnect technology, designed explicitly for accelerating high performance computing (HPC) workloads, rival to Nvidia’s InfiniBand platform. The new benchmark results are cause for celebration at AMD, which in addition to muscling a system built around ARM-based CPUs from the top of the rankings, has also increased its presence in the overall list by 95% year-on-year.
