A supercomputer based on AMD EPYC processors outperformed last year’s champion, the Japanese ARM A64X Fugaku system, reports Engadget. The Frontier is currently undergoing testing at ORNL in Tennessee and will soon be operated by the US Air Force and the Department of Energy.
The system, running on the Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) Cray EX platform, took the lead by a wide margin. It is the world’s first 1.1 exaflops computer. A performance of 1 exaflops means that the machine can perform a quintillion (billion billion, 18-number) operations per second.
At the same time, the performance of Fugaku is 442 petaflops (a petaflop is equal to one quadrillion operations per second).
ORNL complex
With a performance of just 52.23 gigaflops per watt, the American computer outperformed the Japanese MN-3 system in energy efficiency and took first place in the Green500 list. “The fact that the fastest car in the world is also the most energy efficient is amazing,” ORNL laboratory director Thomas Zacharias said at a press conference.
China took two places in the top ten thanks to the Sunway TaihuLight from the National Research Center for Parallel Computing and Technology (NRCPC) and Tianhe-2A built by the China National University of Defense Technology (NUDT). However, China is already rumored to have at least two exascale systems on the new Sunway Oceanlite and Tianhe-3 systems.