The world’s first excellent computer, capable of performing a billion operations per second, has been built by Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.
A typical laptop is only capable of a few teraflops, or a trillion operations per second, which is a million times less. The machine, called Frontier, could help solve a range of complex scientific problems, such as accurate climate modelling, nuclear fusion simulation and drug discovery.
“Frontier will offer modelling and simulation capabilities at the highest level of computing performance,” says Thomas at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
The Frontier computing system is housed in 74 separate cabinets, comprising 9400 CPUs, or standard computer processors, and 37,000 GPUs, which are processors designed to render 3D graphics but can also be used for a range of other tasks.
This means the machine has a total of 8,730,112 cores capable of parallel computing tasks; a typical laptop has between five and nine. At peak power, the computer generates so much heat that it requires four high-powered pumps to push more than 25,000 of water around the machine each minute.
Frontier’s performance means that not only is it number one in the TOP500, an international collaboration to rank the world’s most powerful supercomputers, but it also represents a quarter of the computing power of the entire list.
“One machine represents 25 per cent of the total performance of the whole list, so it’s a very, very impressive achievement,” says Simon McIntosh-Smith at the University of Bristol, UK.
“The rate of improvement in electronics has slowed down somewhat, so we don’t expect machines to proliferate through the TOP500 as quickly as it did for example,” says McIntosh-Smith, referring to machines with a thousandth of the capabilities.
The world’s first excellent computer, capable of performing a billion operations per second, has been built by Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.
A typical laptop is only capable of a few teraflops, or a trillion operations per second, which is a million times less. The machine, called Frontier, could help solve a range of complex scientific problems, such as accurate climate modelling, nuclear fusion simulation and drug discovery.
“Frontier will offer modelling and simulation capabilities at the highest level of computing performance,” says Thomas at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
The Frontier computing system is housed in 74 separate cabinets, comprising 9400 CPUs, or standard computer processors, and 37,000 GPUs, which are processors designed to render 3D graphics but can also be used for a range of other tasks.
This means the machine has a total of 8,730,112 cores capable of parallel computing tasks; a typical laptop has between five and nine. At peak power, the computer generates so much heat that it requires four high-powered pumps to push more than 25,000 of water around the machine each minute.
Frontier’s performance means that not only is it number one in the TOP500, an international collaboration to rank the world’s most powerful supercomputers, but it also represents a quarter of the computing power of the entire list.
“One machine represents 25 per cent of the total performance of the whole list, so it’s a very, very impressive achievement,” says Simon McIntosh-Smith at the University of Bristol, UK.
The rate of improvement in electronics has slowed down somewhat, so we don’t expect machines to proliferate through the TOP500 as quickly as it did for example, says McIntosh-Smith, referring to machines with a thousandth of the capabilities.
You must be logged in to post a comment.