Frontier

Amitava Bhattacharjee

Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory

WDMApp Principal Investigator, Exascale Computing Project

Fusion energy could one day be a transformative energy source, because it will be clean, cheap, and nearly unlimited, with sea water supplying its basic fuel. A whole-device computer model can offer insights about the plasma processes that go on in the fusion device and predictions regarding the performance and optimization of next-step experimental facilities. Using Frontier, we will be able to add new capabilities to the whole-device model, including the effects of the plasma boundary, the effects of fusion products, the influence of sources of heating, and the superimposed engineering structure that would make a fusion reactor operate as a unit. Read Full Q&A

Danny Perez

Los Alamos National Laboratory

EXAALT Principal Investigator, Exascale Computing Project

Studying materials at exascale could have a significant impact on our world, because materials show up everywhere in the economy. Using a combination of advanced methods and scalable codes on Frontier, we’ll be able to perform simulations with potential millionfold increases in our time scales. We’ll also be able to do one-to-one comparisons with experiments and make better predictions about the evolution of these systems. Read Full Q&A

Jacqueline Chen

Sandia National Laboratories

Combustion-Pele Principal Investigator, Exascale Computing Project

Combustion systems are projected to dominate the energy marketplace for decades to come. One engine concept—a low-temperature, reactivity-controlled, compression ignition engine—has the potential to deliver groundbreaking efficiencies of up to 60 percent while reducing emissions. On Frontier, we anticipate using high-fidelity simulations with machine learning and A.I. to model the underlying processes of this promising engine.

John Turner

Oak Ridge National Laboratory

ExaAM Principal Investigator, Exascale Computing Project

The thing that’s really attractive about Frontier is the powerful nodes. Having fewer powerful nodes with a very tightly integrated set of CPUs and GPUs at the node-level gives us the ability to distribute hundreds or thousands of microstructure and property calculations on one or a few nodes across the machine. With Frontier, we’re going to be able to predict the microstructure and properties of an additively manufactured part at much higher fidelity and in many more locations within a part than we are able to even with the world’s current fastest supercomputers. Read Full Q&A

Salman Habib

Argonne National Laboratory

ExaSky Principal Investigator, Exascale Computing Project

Exascale will enable cosmology simulations large enough to model the distribution of billions of galaxies but also fine-grained enough to compare to a range of ground- and satellite-based observations, such as cosmic microwave background measurements and radio, optical, and x-ray data sets. At the same time, Frontier’s AI-oriented technology will enable us to analyze data from simulations in ways we simply can’t today.

Steven Hamilton

Oak Ridge National Laboratory

ExaSMR Principal Investigator, Exascale Computing Project

We’re really excited about having another GPU-based machine here at Oak Ridge. Over the past several years, we’ve spent a lot of effort optimizing our codes to make them run efficiently on GPU-based architectures, so we’re looking forward to continuing that trend with Frontier. Read Full Q&A

Mike Heroux

Sandia National Laboratories

Software Technology Director, Exascale Computing Project

ECP Software Technology is excited to be a part of preparing the software stack for Frontier. We are already on our way, using Summit and Sierra as launching pads. Working with OLCF, Cray, and AMD, we look forward to providing the programming environments and tools, and math, data and visualization libraries that will unlock the potential of Frontier for producing the countless scientific achievements we expect from such a powerful system. We are privileged to be part of the effort.

Dan Jacobson

Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Chief Scientist for Computational Systems Biology

As the compute power increases, it provides new opportunities to obtain more and more details regarding the interactions that are driving organisms, ecosystems, and global climate patterns. With Frontier, we could potentially produce even higher resolution calculations to better understand the dynamics of complex systems. Read Full Q&A

Andreas Kronfeld

Fermilab

LatticeQCD Principal Investigator, Exascale Computing Project

Exascale computing will be essential to precisely illuminating phenomena that emerge from neutrino physics experiments and maintaining the superb cross talk that has existed between the quantitative and the qualitative sides of discoveries in particle and nuclear physics. We anticipate that Frontier will provide the compute power and, just as important, the architecture for computation we must have to do our complicated, difficult calculations.

Tom Evans

Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Technical Lead for the Energy Applications Focus Area, Exascale Computing Project

We are approaching a revolution in how we can design and analyze materials. We can look and carefully characterize the electronic structure of fairly simple atoms and very simple molecules right now. But with exascale computing on Frontier, we're trying to stretch that to molecules that consist of thousands of atoms. The more we understand about the electronic structure, the more we're able to actually manufacture and use exotic materials for things like very small, high tensile strength materials and buildings to make them more energy efficient. At the end of the day, everything in some sense comes down to materials.

Andrew Siegel

Argonne National Laboratory

Application Development Director, Exascale Computing Project

At the inception of the ECP project we asked researchers to imagine new frontiers in science and engineering enabled by exascale computing. With Frontier, we have the opportunity now to fully realize our original vision, solving grand challenge problems that lead to breakthroughs in areas of energy generation, materials design, earth and space sciences, and related fields of physics and engineering.

Amedeo Perazzo

SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

ExaFEL Principal Investigator, Exascale Computing Project

Free-electron X-ray laser facilities, such as the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, produce ultrafast pulses from which scientists take stop-action pictures of moving atoms and molecules for research in physics, chemistry, and biology. For example, LCLS will be able to reconstruct biological structures in unprecedented atomic detail under physiological conditions. We foresee that access to Frontier will enable the LCLS users to achieve not only higher resolution and significantly deeper scientific insight than are possible today but also a dramatically increased image reconstruction rate for the delivery of information in minutes rather than weeks.

Bronson Messer

Oak Ridge National Laboratory

ExaStar team member, Exascale Computing Project

ExaStar is an effort to build multiphysics models of stellar explosions. We want to figure out how space and time get warped by gravitational waves, how neutrinos and other subatomic particles are formed in these explosions, and how the nuclear elements are synthesized. The large amount of very fast memory we’re going to have on Frontier is going to be a real boon to our simulations. Read Full Q&A

Thom Dunning Jr.

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

NWChemEx Principal Investigator, Exascale Computing Project

One of the US Department of Energy’s goals is to find ways of replacing hydrocarbons derived from fossil fuels with hydrocarbons that are produced using biomass. Scientists haven’t been able to model the molecular processes central to achieving this goal with the rigor needed because these processes involve hundreds to thousands of atoms that must be modeled to chemical accuracy to pin down the mechanism for converting biomass-derived molecules into usable fuels. Combining innovations in molecular theory, modeling software, and the underlying algorithms with access to world leading supercomputers such as Frontier is key to our project’s success.

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.

Direction of Discovery

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

Exascale In America

Scientific Impact

Amitava Bhattacharjee

WDMApp Principal Investigator, Exascale Computing Project

Pioneering Open Science

World Leading Systems

Jaguar

No. 1 in 2009, 2010

Titan

No. 1 in 2012

Summit

No. 1 in 2018

Frontier

No. 1 in 2022

Frontier CAAR Program