The United States has reclaimed the top spot from Japan in the race to create the world’s fastest supercomputer.
ORNL is part of the U.S. Department of Energy.
“Frontier’s early performance on the Linpack benchmark amounts to more than seven times that of Summit at 148.6 petaflops,” ORNL added.
“This milestone offers just a preview of Frontier’s unmatched capability as a tool for scientific discovery. It is the result of more than a decade of collaboration among the national laboratories, academia, and private industry, including DOE’s Exascale Computing Project, which is deploying the applications, software technologies, hardware, and integration necessary to ensure impact at the exascale.”
The top position for the world’s most powerful publicly known systems was previously held by Japan’s Arm-based Fugaku for two years.
They are typically used to help scientists and researchers solve complex scientific problems that involve a lot of mathematical calculations, such as simulating the effects of a nuclear explosion, forecasting the weather, and oil and gas exploration.
Frontier is so powerful that it can make these complex calculations in one second, something that would take four years if every person on earth completed one calculation per second.
ORNL said it now plans to continue testing and validating the supercomputer, which is set to receive final acceptance and early science access later in 2022 and will be open for full scientific use at the start of 2023.
China, which has become a dominant force in technology, has reportedly not submitted test results of those machines to the scientists who oversee the so-called Top500 ranking.
It is unclear why, but some experts believe this may be due to tensions between China and the United States, given that such a supercomputer could drastically bolster China’s national defense systems.