With the world’s first exascale supercomputing system now open to full user operations, research teams are harnessing Frontier’s power and speed to tackle some of the most challenging problems in modern science.

The HPE Cray EX system at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory debuted in May 2022 as the fastest computer on the planet and first machine to break the exascale barrier at 1.1 exaflops, or 1.1 quintillion calculations per second. That’s more calculations per second than every human on Earth could perform in four years, assuming they completed one calculation each second.

Frontier remains in the number one spot on the May 2023 TOP500 rankings, with an updated HPL, or High-Performance Linpack, score of 1.194 exaflops. The increase of .092 exaflops, or 92 petaflops, is equivalent to the eighth most powerful supercomputer in the world on the TOP500 list. Engineers at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, which houses Frontier and its predecessor Summit, expect that Frontier’s speeds could ultimately top 1.4 exaflops, or 1.4 quintillion calculations per second.

In addition to the updated HPL number, the Frontier team has improved the High-Performance Linpack-Mixed Precision Benchmark, HPL-MxP, to nearly 10 exaflops. Frontier’s HPL-MxP performance is now 9.950 exaflops, improved from 7.9 exaflops in November 2022.

“Frontier represents the culmination of more than a decade of hard work by dedicated professionals from across academia, private business and the national laboratory complex through the Exascale Computing Project to realize a goal that once seemed barely possible,” said Doug Kothe, ORNL’s associate laboratory director for computing and computational sciences. “This machine will shrink the timeline for discoveries that will change the world for the better and touch everyone on Earth.”

Some of the studies underway on Frontier include:

• ExaSMR: Led by ORNL’s Steven Hamilton, this study seeks to cut out the long timelines and high front-end costs of advanced nuclear reactor design and use exascale computing power to simulate modular reactors that would not only be smaller but also safer, more versatile and customizable to sizes beyond the traditional huge reactors that power cities.
• Exascale Atomistic Capability for Accuracy, Length and Time (EXAALT): This molecular dynamics study, led by Danny Perez of Los Alamos National Laboratory, seeks to transform fundamental materials science for energy by using exascale computing speeds to enable vastly larger, faster and more accurate simulations for such applications as nuclear fission and fusion.
• Combustion PELE: This study, named for the Hawaiian goddess of fire and led by Jacqueline Chen of Sandia National Laboratories, is designed to simulate the physics inside an internal combustion engine in pursuit of developing cleaner, more efficient engines that would reduce carbon emissions and conserve fossil fuels.