A new supercomputer powered by AMD EPYC CPUs known as Frontier has become the world’s fastest and most powerful supercomputer. It is located at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Frontier takes the record from the Fugaku supercomputer.
Perhaps more important than breaking a record is the fact the AMD Frontier becomes the first supercomputer to break the exascale barrier.
The success was announced by Forrest Norrod, senior vice president and general manager Data Center Solutions Group, AMD, in a press statement:
“We are excited that AMD EPYC processors and AMD Instinct accelerators power the world’s fastest, most energy efficient, and first supercomputer to break the exascale barrier.
Innovation and delivering more performance and efficiency for supercomputers is critical to addressing the world’s most complex challenges. AMD EPYC processors and AMD Instinct accelerators continue to push the envelope in high performance computing, providing the performance needed to advance scientific discoveries.”
Details
As well as busting performance records, the Frontier is also the most power-efficient supercomputer. It provides 62.68 gigaflops/watt power-efficiency on a single cabinet. It uses third generation (3rd Gen) AMD EPYC CPUs and AMD Instinct MI250x accelerators.
Other specs include the HPE Slingshot-11 interconnect solution that handles networking. This tech provides dedicated acceleration for high performance computing (HPC) workloads. AMD claims it is the leader in HPC because it allows customers and partners to deploy clusters of varying sizes.
AMD is now putting Frontier through testing and validation, which should run until later in 2022. Next, the company will allow access to the supercomputer for a select number of researchers before the end of the year. Frontier should make its public debut in 2023.
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