Hewlett Packard Enterprise Frontier, or OLCF-5, is the world's first exascale supercomputer, hosted at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) in

Tennessee Tennessee ( , ), officially the State of Tennessee, is a landlocked state in the Southeastern region of the United States. Tennessee is the 36th-largest by area and the 15th-most populous of the 50 states. It is bordered by Kentucky to ...

, United States and first operational in 2022. It is based on the Cray EX and is the successor to

Summit A summit is a point on a surface that is higher in elevation than all points immediately adjacent to it. The topographic terms acme, apex, peak (mountain peak), and zenith are synonymous. The term (mountain top) is generally used only for a m ...

(OLCF-4). , Frontier was the world's fastest supercomputer using AMD

CPU A central processing unit (CPU), also called a central processor, main processor or just processor, is the electronic circuitry that executes instructions comprising a computer program. The CPU performs basic arithmetic, logic, controlling, and ...

s and GPUs. Frontier achieved an Rmax of 1.102 exaFLOPS, which is 1.102 quintillion operations per second. Measured at 62.68 gigaflops/watt, Frontier topped the Green500 list for most efficient supercomputer, until it was dethroned by Flatiron Institute's Henri supercomputer in November 2022.

Design

Frontier uses 9,472 AMD Epyc 7A53s "Trento" 64 core 2 GHz CPUs (606,208 cores) and 37,888 Radeon Instinct MI250X GPUs (8,335,360 cores). They can perform double precision operations at the same speed as single precision. "Trento" is an optimized 3rd Gen EPYC CPU ("Milan"), which itself is based on Zen 3. It occupies 74 rack cabinets. Each cabinet hosts 64 blades, each consisting of 2 nodes. Blades are interconnected by HPE Slingshot 64-port switch that provides 12.8 terabits/second of bandwidth. Groups of blades are linked in a dragonfly topology with at most three hops between any two nodes. Cabling is either optical or copper, customized to minimize cable length. Total cabling runs . Frontier is liquid-cooled, allowing 5x the density of air-cooled architectures. Each node consists of one CPU, 4 GPUs and 5 terabytes of flash memory. Each GPU has 128 GB of RAM soldered onto it. Frontier has coherent interconnects between CPUs and GPUs, allowing GPU memory to be accessed coherently by code running on the Epyc CPUs. Frontier uses an internal 75 TB/s read / 35 TB/s write / 15 billion IOPS flash storage system, along with the 700 PB Orion site-wide Lustre filesystem. Frontier consumes 21 MW (compared to its predecessor Summit's 13 MW); it has been estimated that the next US exascale system,

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, will consume around 60 MW.

History

The original design envisioned hundreds of thousands of GPUs and 150–500 MW of power. Oak Ridge partnered with HPE Cray and AMD to build the system. The machine was built at a cost of US$600 million. It began deployment in 2021 and reached full capability in 2022. It clocked 1.1 exaflops Rmax in May 2022, making it the world's fastest supercomputer as measured in the June 2022 edition of the

TOP500 The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful non- distributed computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year. The first of these updates always coinc ...

list, replacing Fugaku. Upon its release the supercomputer topped the Green500 list for most efficient supercomputer, measured at 62.68 gigaflops/watt. “Frontier is ushering in a new era of exascale computing to solve the world’s biggest scientific challenges,” ORNL Director Thomas Zacharia said. “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.”

References

{{S-end Cray products Exascale computers GPGPU supercomputers Oak Ridge National Laboratory X86 supercomputers 64-bit computers