Since 1993, the list of the most powerful computers in the world has been established in the Top 500 project, and in June this year its 59th edition since then was published. This list presents the most powerful supercomputers according to their performance in LINPACK markerswhich show the raw computing power of computers.
Meet Frontier, the most powerful computer in the world
Located at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computer Facility (OLCF) in Tennessee, USA, the world’s most powerful computer, Frontier, created by HP, is currently in use. We are dealing with an exascale supercomputer, and it is not that it is a PC that fits in a conventional case, but rather that it occupies the trifle of 680 square meters, and consists of several cabinets server rack (a total of 74 19 1-inch cabinets, each housing 64 servers, and each server consists of 2 nodes interconnected by 64-port HPE Slingshot switches that have 12.8 terabits/s of bandwidth
This “beast” incorporates within itself a huge 9,472 processors AMD Epyc 7A53s “Trento”, each with 64 cores at 2 GHz (for a total of 606,208 cores) plus nothing more and nothing less than 37,888 graphics cards AMD Radeon Instinct MI250X, each with 220 cores for a total of 8,335,360 GPU cores.
Before, we were talking about “nodes”, which in short are “servers”, and in total there are 9,472 since each node has a processor. For each processor there are 4 graphics cards and 5 terabytes of flash memory (SSD) for a total of 47,360TB of storage, plus 128GB of soldered RAM (this means that in total Frontier has 1,212,416GB of RAM memory, or 1184 TB of RAM). In addition to these 47,360 TB of Flash storage, Frontier has an internal storage system capable of providing a performance of 75 TB/s in reading, 35 TB/s in writing and 15,000 million IOPS, in addition to ‘a Luster Orion File System’ 700 PB (picobytes).
Of course, keep an eye on the data because Frontier, in addition to being the most powerful computer in the world to date, is also the one that consumes the most: no less than 21 MW, almost double the 13 MW that Summit consumed, its predecessor. In addition, you should know that its successor, called Aurora, is already under construction, which is estimated to consume around 60 MW of energy.
OK, but what’s the use of so much power?
Supercomputers have always been questioned because they have really high power consumption, they have extremely high maintenance and cooling requirements, and their raw power is so high that some people wonder what good it can be used for.
Supercomputers play a fundamental role in the field of computer science, being used to quickly perform extremely complex calculations that concern all kinds of fields, such as quantum mechanics, weather forecasting, climate change research, molecular modeling for the search for cures and diseases. , cancer research, and of course for the calculations needed in the aerospace field.
These machines were first introduced in the 1960s in response to the research needs of science, and have since become a milestone in history as they greatly speed up the necessary calculations and simulations that would otherwise have taken decades. to achieve. In other words, these supercomputers, like Frontier, are essential for research and development, and ultimately, for science, which brings us the technological advances we see every year.