Direction of Discovery

ORNL’s exascale supercomputer is delivering world-leading performance in 2022 and beyond.

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It has been basic United States policy that Government should foster the opening of new frontiers. It opened the seas to clipper ships and furnished land for pioneers. Although these frontiers have more or less disappeared, the frontier of science remains. Vannevar Bush, “Science, The Endless Frontier” — 1945

Exascale In America

Exascale is the next level of computing performance. By solving calculations five times faster than today’s top supercomputers—exceeding a quintillion, or 1018, calculations per second—Frontier will enable scientists to develop new technologies for energy, medicine, and materials.

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Scientific Impact

Pioneering Open Science

Delivered in 2021 and open for early operations in 2022, Frontier is accelerating innovation in science and technology and maintaining US leadership in high-performance computing and artificial intelligence. Frontier users will model the entire lifespan of a nuclear reactor, uncover disease genetics, and build on recent developments in science and technology to further integrate artificial intelligence with data analytics and modeling and simulation.

The system is based on HPE Cray’s new EX architecture and slingshot interconnect with optimized 3rd Gen AMD EPYC CPUs for HPC and AI, and AMD Instinct 250X accelerators.

System Specs Titan Summit Frontier
Peak Performance 27 PF 200 PF 1.6 EF
Cabinets 200 256 74
Node 1 AMD Opteron CPU
1 NVIDIA K20X Kepler GPU
2 IBM POWER9™ CPUs
6 NVIDIA Volta GPUs
1 HPC and AI Optimized 3rd Gen AMD EPYC CPU
4 Purpose Built AMD Instinct 250X GPUs
CPU-GPU Interconnect PCI Gen2 NVLINK
Coherent memory across the node
AMD Infinity Fabric
System Interconnect Gemini 2x Mellanox EDR 100G InfiniBand
Non-Blocking Fat-Tree
Multiple Slingshot NICs providing 100 GB/s network bandwidth. Slingshot network which provides adaptive routing, congestion management and quality of service.
Storage 32 PB, 1 TB/s, Lustre Filesystem 250 PB, 2.5 TB/s, GPFS™ 2-4x performance and capacity of Summit’s I/O subsystem. Frontier will have near node storage like Summit.
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World Leading Systems

Oak Ridge National Laboratory has decades of experience in delivering, operating, and conducting research on world-leading supercomputers. Since 2005, Oak Ridge National Laboratory has deployed Jaguar, Titan, and Summit, each the world’s faster computer in its time. Frontier has leveraged ORNL’s extensive experience and expertise in GPU-accelerated computing to become the US Department of Energy’s next record-breaking supercomputer and the world’s first exascale system.

Jaguar

No. 1 in 2009, 2010

Titan

No. 1 in 2012

Summit

No. 1 in 2018

Frontier

No. 1 in 2022

Frontier CAAR Program

In preparation for the Frontier supercomputer, OLCF selected eight research projects to participate in the Frontier Center for Accelerated Application Readiness (CAAR) program. Through Frontier CAAR, the OLCF is partnering with application core developers, vendor partners, and OLCF staff members to optimize simulation, data-intensive, and machine learning scientific applications for exascale performance, ensuring that Frontier is able to perform large-scale science for users starting in 2022. Consisting of application core developers and staff from the OLCF, the partnership teams have received technical support from HPE Cray and AMD – Frontier’s primary vendors – and access to multiple early-generation hardware platforms prior to system deployment.

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