HPE's Frontier supercomputer with its AMD components is the first Western exascale system and takes #1 spot on the Top500 list. The two partners thus achieve a tremendous prestige victory, above all over Intel's Aurora system, which, after a long delay, has lost out in the end.
Victory goes to Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and AMD. With the Frontier system, they were the first western system to exceed the computing power mark of one ExaFLOPS. According to the operators at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, 1.102 ExaFLOPS are available as a permanently possible performance, and the system can even offer 1.686 ExaFLOPS at its peak. This is made possible once again by the power of the GPUs – 37,632 to be precise.
Infographic (Image: HPE) Inside the supercomputer, 9,408 processors from the AMD Epyc series are combined in an optimized “Trento” variant, whose 64 cores only clock at 2 GHz for reasons of efficiency, with 37,632 AMD Instinct MI250x, so there are four GPU accelerators for each CPU. Stored in 74 Cray EX cabinets, colloquially “server cabinets”, and connected with 90 miles of network cables, the currently fastest system is created. 100 percent water cooling ensures that the components are cooled accordingly.
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Components in the Frontier system (Image: HPE)
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Components in the Frontier System 
What else goes with it The system will also work very efficiently thanks to the GPUs. With an output of “52.23 gigaflops performance per watt” it also takes the top position in the Green500 list by working more than 32 percent more efficiently than the current number 2.
View inside (Image: HPE) The The starting signal today also refutes rumors about problems with the system, although it will not be productive for everyone until the end of the year or early 2023. The problems are still with Intel and Aurora, there it will definitely be nothing before the end of 2022.
The fact that it was not enough for the first exascale system is due to China . Two systems have been suspected here for a year or even two years.
ComputerBase has Received information about this item from HPE under NDA. The only requirement was the earliest possible publication date.