In a shock upset of twenty first century know-how norms, Oak Ridge Nationwide Laboratory has made a pc that’s, in truth, very giant. The Frontier supercomputer is just too massive to slot in a pocket or a backpack, like right now’s hottest computer systems, and additionally it is too massive to slot in a mid-tower PC case, which may comfortably maintain an RTX 3090. How a lot larger may a pc actually should be?
A lot larger, insists Oak Ridge Nationwide Laboratory. ORNL’s Frontier (opens in new tab) has been heralded because the “first true exascale machine,” setting a report for efficiency of 1.02 exaflops per second on a high-performance benchmark. An exaflop is one quintillion floating level operations per second, and when you’re undecided how massive a quintillion is, it is one million million tens of millions, aka a billion billions. NASA estimates that the Milky Approach is one quintillion kilometers throughout.
So, fairly massive.
Frontier set the exaflop report utilizing AMD’s 64-core 2GHz Epyc processors, which you should purchase your self for less than $8,000 or so. However you may want a number of of them, as a result of the Frontier has a complete of 8,730,112 cores.
That is 136,408 AMD Epyc processors. This pc is unfashionably giant: it is not going to match below your desk, and even in your own home except you knock down a number of partitions or have a a lot larger home than I do.
The Frontier supercomputer can also be remarkably environment friendly regardless of filling up a number of server banks, every larger than Andre the Large. Frontier is now #1 on the High 500 supercomputer checklist and the Inexperienced 500, which charges for efficiency per watt.
Listed below are some extra massive numbers:
- Frontier takes up 7,300 sq. toes.
- Frontier circulates about 6,000 gallons of water per minute to remain cool.
- Frontier “at the moment has achieved 1.102 Exaflop/s utilizing 8,730,112 cores. The brand new HPE Cray EX structure combines third Gen AMD Epyc CPUs optimized for HPC and AI with AMD Intuition 250X accelerators and Slingshot-11 interconnect.”
- “This method is ready to produce a whopping 1.102 Exaflop/s HPL benchmark rating whereas maintaining its energy effectivity at 55.23 gigaflops/watt”
- “The system to assert the No. 1 spot for the Inexperienced 500 is the Frontier Check & Improvement System (TDS). With 120,832 whole cores and an HPL benchmark of 19.2 PFlop/s, the Frontier TDS machine is mainly only one rack equivalent to the precise Frontier system. Subsequently, it is smart that it’s outmatched by Frontier’s 7,733,248 cores and HPL benchmark of 1.102 Exaflop/s. Nevertheless, Frontier TDS has some spectacular effectivity capabilities, with an influence effectivity of 62.8 gigaflops/watt.”
- Andre the Large was 7 toes, 4 inches tall and weighed 520 kilos. Sq. footage unknown.
