Jump to content

Frontier (supercomputer)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Citation bot (talk | contribs) at 22:36, 24 November 2022 (Alter: title. | Use this bot. Report bugs. | Suggested by Whoop whoop pull up | #UCB_webform 209/1195). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Frontier
OperatorsOak Ridge National Laboratory and U.S. Department of Energy
LocationOak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility
Power21 MW
Operating systemHPE Cray OS
Space680 m2 (7,300 sq ft)
Speed1.102 exaFLOPS (Rmax) / 1.685 exaFLOPS (Rpeak)[1]
CostUS$600M (estimated cost)
PurposeScientific research
Websitehttps://www.olcf.ornl.gov/frontier/

Hewlett Packard Enterprise Frontier, or OLCF-5, is the world's first exascale supercomputer, hosted at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) in Tennessee, United States and first operational in 2022. It is based on the Cray EX and is the successor to Summit (OLCF-4). As of June 2022, Frontier was the world's fastest supercomputer using AMD CPUs and GPUs.[2][3][4][5] Frontier achieved an Rmax of 1.102 exaFLOPS, which is 1.102 quintillion operations per second.[6] The supercomputer tops the Green500 list for most efficient supercomputer, measured at 62.68 gigaflops/watt.[6]

Design

Frontier uses 9,472 AMD Epyc 7A53s "Trento" 64 core 2 GHz CPUs (606,208 cores) and 37,888 Radeon Instinct MI250X GPUs (8,335,360 cores). They can perform double precision operations at the same speed as single precision.[7]

"Trento" is an optimized 3rd Gen EPYC CPU[8] ("Milan"), which itself is based on Zen 3.

It occupies 74 19-inch (48 cm) rack cabinets.[9] Each cabinet hosts 64 blades, each consisting of 2 nodes.

Blades are interconnected by HPE Slingshot 64-port switch that provides 12.8 terabits/second of bandwidth. Groups of blades are linked in a dragonfly topology with at most three hops between any two nodes. Cabling is either optical or copper, customized to minimize cable length. Total cabling runs 145 km (90 mi). Frontier is liquid-cooled, allowing 5x the density of air-cooled architectures.[7]

Each node consists of one CPU, 4 GPUs and 5 terabytes of flash memory. Each GPU has 128 GB of RAM soldered onto it.[7]

Frontier has coherent interconnects between CPUs and GPUs, allowing GPU memory to be accessed coherently by code running on the Epyc CPUs.[10]

Frontier uses an internal 75 TB/s read / 35 TB/s write / 15 billion IOPS flash storage system, along with the 700 PB Orion site-wide Lustre filesystem.[11]

Frontier consumes 21 MW (compared to its predecessor Summit's 13 MW); it has been estimated that Frontier's successor, Aurora, will consume around 60 MW.[12]

History

The original design envisioned hundreds of thousands of GPUs and 150–500 MW of power.[7] Oak Ridge partnered with HPE Cray and AMD to build the system.

The machine was built at a cost of US$600 million. It began deployment in 2021[13] and reached full capability in 2022.[14] It clocked 1.1 exaflops Rmax in May 2022, making it the world's fastest supercomputer as measured in the June 2022 edition of the TOP500 list, replacing Fugaku.[1][15]

Upon its release the supercomputer topped the Green500 list for most efficient supercomputer, measured at 62.68 gigaflops/watt.[6]

“Frontier is ushering in a new era of exascale computing to solve the world’s biggest scientific challenges,” ORNL Director Thomas Zacharia said. “This milestone offers just a preview of Frontier’s unmatched capability as a tool for scientific discovery. It is the result of more than a decade of collaboration among the national laboratories, academia and private industry, including DOE’s Exascale Computing Project, which is deploying the applications, software technologies, hardware and integration necessary to ensure impact at the exascale.”[11]

References

  1. ^ a b "TOP500 June 2022". 30 May 2022.
  2. ^ Wells, Jack (2018-03-19). "Powering the Road to National HPC Leadership". OpenPOWER Summit 2018.
  3. ^ Bethea, Katie (2018-02-13). "Frontier: OLCF'S Exascale Future – Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility". Oak Ridge National Laboratory - Leadership Computing Facility. Archived from the original on 2018-03-10.
  4. ^ "DOE Under Secretary for Science Dabbar's Exascale Update". insideHPC. 9 October 2020. Archived from the original on 2020-10-28.
  5. ^ Don Clark (May 30, 2022). "U.S. Retakes Top Spot in Supercomputer Race". New York Times.
  6. ^ a b c Larabel, Michael (30 May 2022). "AMD-Powered Frontier Supercomputer Tops Top500 At 1.1 Exaflops, Tops Green500 Too". Phoronix. Retrieved 1 June 2022.
  7. ^ a b c d Choi, Charles Q. (2022-06-24). "The Beating Heart of the World's First Exascale Supercomputer". IEEE Spectrum. Retrieved 2022-08-14.
  8. ^ "Crusher Quick-Start Guide — OLCF User Documentation". docs.olcf.ornl.gov. Retrieved 2022-11-08.
  9. ^ "FRONTIER Spec Sheet". Retrieved 2022-05-31.
  10. ^ "AMD Preparing More Linux Code For The Frontier Supercomputer". Archived from the original on 2021-05-28.
  11. ^ a b "Frontier supercomputer debuts as world's fastest, breaking exascale barrier". Oak Ridge National Laboratory. May 30, 2022.
  12. ^ "How Argonne Is Preparing for Exascale in 2022". HPCwire. 8 September 2021. Retrieved 14 June 2022.
  13. ^ "US Closes in on Exascale: Frontier Installation Is Underway". HPC Wire. 29 September 2021. Retrieved 3 January 2022.
  14. ^ "First Look At Oak Ridge's "Frontier" Exascaler, Contrasted To Argonne's "Aurora"". Next Platform. 4 October 2021. Retrieved 3 January 2022.
  15. ^ "US Takes Supercomputer Top Spot with First True Exascale Machine".
Records
Preceded by World's most powerful supercomputer
May 2022 – 		Incumbent
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Frontier_(supercomputer)&oldid=1123650608"