ORNL Celebrates Launch of Frontier, the World’s Fastest Supercomputer

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory celebrated the debut of Frontier, the world’s fastest supercomputer and the dawn of the exascale computing era.

Deputy secretary of energy David Turk, DOE Office of Science director Asmeret Asefaw Berhe and US Rep. Chuck Fleischmann joined ORNL director Thomas Zacharia, ORNL site office director Johnny Moore and computing vendor partners Lisa Su, chair and CEO of AMD, and Antonio Neri, president and CEO of HPE, to congratulate the public-private team that made Frontier’s record-setting performance possible.

“Research that might once have taken weeks to complete, Frontier will tear through in hours, even seconds,” Turk said. “Oak Ridge has positioned the United States to lead the world in solving massive scientific challenges across the board.”

“Exascale computing is a powerful tool that will allow us to advance the core missions of the Office of Science — to deliver scientific discoveries and major scientific tools that will transform our understanding of nature and advance the energy, economic, and national security of the U.S.,” Berhe said. “Frontier makes exascale computing a reality and opens many doors for the future of scientific research to solve big problems.”

Frontier leverages ORNL’s extensive expertise in accelerated computing for open science and will enable researchers to tackle problems of national and global importance deemed impossible to solve as recently as five years ago.

“We are incredibly proud of the team that has made ORNL home to the world’s first exascale computer. This accomplishment was possible due to the strong public-private partnerships between DOE, ORNL, HPE, and AMD,” Zacharia said. “Working with our sister labs and academic partners, Frontier is already delivering science on day one.”

Frontier earned the No. 1 spot on the 59th TOP500 list in May 2022 with 1.1 exaflops of performance – more than a quintillion, or 10 to the 18th, calculations per second – making it the fastest computer in the world and the first to achieve exascale.

“Frontier marks the start of the exascale era for scientific computing,” said Bronson Messer, director of science for ORNL’s Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, which houses Frontier. “The science that’s going to be done on Frontier is going to ignite an explosion of innovation – and of new questions we haven’t even thought of before.”

ORNL’s scientific partners, such as General Electric Aviation and GE Power, plan to leverage the power of Frontier to revolutionize the future of flight with sustainable hydrogen propulsion and hybrid electric technologies and to maximize the potential of clean-energy technologies such as wind power.

“GE Aerospace and Research will be using exascale computing, including time on the Frontier supercomputer, to revolutionize the future of flight with sustainable hydrogen propulsion and hybrid electric technologies,” said David Kepczynski, chief information officer at GE Research. “In pursuit of a net-zero carbon future, exascale supercomputing systems will be indispensable tools for GE researchers and engineers working at the cutting edge to ‘Build a World that Works.’”

The work to deliver, install and test Frontier began in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, as shutdowns around the world strained international supply chains. More than 100 team members worked around the clock to source millions of components, ensure timely deliveries of system parts, and carefully install and test 74 HPE Cray EX cabinets that include more than 9,400 AMD-powered nodes and 90 miles of interconnect cables.

ORNL and its partners are on schedule as they continue the stand-up of Frontier. Next steps include additional testing and validation of the system, which remains on track for final acceptance and early science access later in 2022. Full access for science applications is expected at the beginning of 2023.