The US now has the world's fastest supercomputer

It’s been a while since I wrote about Fugaku: Japan’s new next-gen supercomputer. Well, it seems that the US have thrown down the gauntlet with its Frontier system from Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee which is now the fastest supercomputer in the world:

The Frontier system’s score of 1.102 exaflop/s makes it “the most powerful supercomputer to ever exist” and “the first true exascale machine,” the Top 500 project said Monday in the announcement of its latest rankings. Exaflop/s (or exaflops) is short for 1 quintillion floating-point operations per second.

Frontier was more than twice as fast as a Japanese system that placed second in the rankings, which are based on the LINPACK benchmark that measures the “performance of a dedicated system for solving a dense system of linear equations.”

As for its future uses, well… anything and everything according to the DOE:

The new systems will provide 50 to 100 times greater performance than the current fastest U.S. supercomputer. They will enable breakthroughs in both science and industry through modeling and simulation, high-performance data analysis, and artificial intelligence and machine learning applications. Potential examples include:

· Identifying next-generation materials

· Deciphering high-energy physics data

· Combating cancer

· Accelerating industrial product design and reducing cost-to-market

· Evaluating options for nuclear security

(via Ars Technica)

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