The Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is home to America’s first exascale system, the 2 exaflops HPE Cray EX Frontier supercomputer. Exascale is the next level of computing performance. By solving calculations more than five times faster than today’s top supercomputers—exceeding a quintillion, or a billion billion, calculations per second—exascale systems will enable scientists to develop critically needed technologies for energy, medicine, materials, and more.
ORNL has decades of experience in the delivery and operation of world-leading supercomputers for scientific discovery. Since 2006, the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility has deployed four supercomputers that debuted as fastest in the world, including Summit in 2018. In May 2022, Frontier came online as the first exascale machine in the world. Its power will help researchers answer problems of national importance that cannot be addressed on existing supercomputing platforms, such as:
- enhance nuclear reactor efficiency and safety by modeling their entire life span;
- uncover the underlying genetics of disease;
- discover patterns in patient data for precision medicine; and
- further integrate artificial intelligence with data analytics, modeling, and simulation.