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Frontier — World’s First ExaFLOPS Supercomputer

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Abstract

A race began around 2010 among many countries to build a supercomputer that would breach the ExaFLOPS (1018 floatingpoint operations per second) barrier, a formidable goal. Frontier, a supercomputer designed by a team of engineers from Cray-HPE and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, achieved this goal in May 2022. It executed the HPLinpack benchmark program at a speed of 1.102 ExaFLOPS. In this article, I trace the events leading up to the design of Frontier and its architecture. I also describe various benchmarks used to compare the speeds of high-performance computers.

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Suggested Reading

  1. National Strategic Computing Initiative, Issued by Barak Obama on July 29, 2015. https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2015/07/29/executive-order-creating-national-strategic-computing-initiative

  2. Exascale Computing Project, https://www.exascaleproject.org/about/

  3. Tops 500, June 2022. https://ww.top500.org/lists/top500/2022/06/

  4. Charles Q. Choi, Beneath the Hood of the First Exascale Computer, IEEE Spectrum, Volume 69, Issue 8, August 2022. https://spectrum.ieee.org/frontier-exascale-supercomputer. See also https://icl.utk.edu/files/publications/2022/iclutk-1570-2022.pdf

  5. Reference for Dragonfly Topology. https://www.hpcwire.com/2019/07/15/super-connecting-the-supercomputers-innovations-through-network-topologies/ See also https://www.olcf.ornl.gov/frontier/

  6. Frontier Center for Accelerated Applications Readiness. https://www.olcf.ornl.gov/caar/frontier-caar/

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Acknowledgement

I thank Dr S. Balakrishnan, Prof. R. Govindarajan, and Prof. S. Ramani, and an anonymous referee for reviewing this article and for their valuable suggestions that improved it.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Supercomputer Education & Research Centre, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, 560 012, India

    V. Rajaraman

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  1. V. Rajaraman
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Correspondence to V. Rajaraman.

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V. Rajaraman is at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru. Several generations of scientists and engineers in India have learnt computer science using his lucidly written textbooks on programming and computer fundamentals. His current research interests are parallel computing and history of computing.

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Rajaraman, V. Frontier — World’s First ExaFLOPS Supercomputer. Reson 28, 567–576 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12045-023-1583-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12045-023-1583-7

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