AMD/Cray supercomputer

Frontier. © Cray.

AMD and Cray have announced that they will be building the Frontier, a new supercomputer, for the US Departement of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. It will have over 1.5 exaFLOP/s of power, or 1.5×10¹⁸ operations per second, or the equivalent of 100,000 Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 cards. It will require 150km of cabling and 100 cabinets over 680m². It will use AMD’s Epyc CPUs (Zen 3 or Zen 4 microarchitecture). The project is evaluated at 600 million dollars and the computer should be commissionned in 2021. It will be one of the world’s first machines to compute in terms of exaFLOP/s (along with Intel/Cray’s one-exaFLOP/s Aurora, also to be delivered in 2021, and most probably a Chinese supercomputer to be delivered in 2020). World’s current most powerful computer, the Summit (also at Oak Ridge) is a bare 200,794 teraFLOP/s, or a scant 0.2008 exaFLOP/s.

⇨ The Verge, “World’s fastest supercomputer will be built by AMD and Cray for US government.”