Frontier supercomputer powered by AMD is the fastest in the world

The AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory has bagged the top spot on the Top500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers. The Top500 list also said that the Frontier system is the first true exascale machine with an HPL score of 1.102 Exaflop/s. For two years, the top spot was occupied by the Fugaku system at the RIKEN Center for Computational Science (R-CCS) in Kobe, Japan.

Based on the latest HPE Cray EX235a architecture and equipped with AMD EPYC 64C 2GHz processors, the system has 8,730,112 total cores and a power efficiency rating of 52.23 gigaflops/watt. It relies on gigabit ethernet for data transfer. 

AMD added that Frontier's performance is more than double the number two system and greater than the sum of the next seven systems on the latest Top500 list. "The Frontier test and development system (TDS) secured the first place in the Green500 list, delivering 62.68 gigaflops/watt power-efficiency from a single cabinet of optimised 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors and AMD Instinct MI250x accelerators," added AMD.

USA and China dominate

Top500 also stated that an observation that has come out from the recent lists is that China and the United States are the two countries with the most entries on the list. "While China stagnated at 173 systems, the United States dropped from 150 systems to 126," it added. The two countries make up for nearly two-thirds of the supercomputers on the TOP500," it added.

The third position in the list is taken up by the LUMI system at EUROHPC/CSC in Finland (the system has 1,110,144 cores and has an HPL benchmark of nearly 152 PFlop/s). It is the largest system in Europe. At the tenth position was the addition of the Adastra system at GENCI-CINES in France. It achieved an HPL benchmark score of 46.1 Pflop/s and is the second most powerful machine in Europe, after LUMI.