1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 operations per second… The era of exascale supercom begins
Mi Frontier, 110 or 2 trillion times per second...
From 1 trillion to 100 views after 25 years of becoming the strongest supercom ... 1 million-fold performance improvement Expected to play a
major role in climate model, new energy and drug development
2.5 operations per second is the best
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| World most powerful Supercomputer 'Frontier' |
100 rounds per second.
The era of supercomputers in which the number of operations per second reached the exa (100 magnification = 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 = 10^18) level has begun.
It took 11 years to transition from Terra to Peta and 14 years to transition from Peta to Exa since the first Terra (1 trillion) class supercom appeared in 1997 and the Peta (1000 trillion) class supercom was introduced in 2008. That's a million-fold improvement in skills in 25 years.
Supercomputers with outstanding computational power that cannot be surpassed by ordinary computers are another silent battlefield in the digital world.
Supercomputers were originally created for military purposes, such as cracking code, but have now become indispensable tools for solving complex problems faced by science and industrial society, from product design to vaccine development, climate change modeling, and space simulation.
Since the 2000s, Japan and China have joined the supercomputer competition structure, in which the United States has an overwhelming advantage, and the three countries have been up and down for the position of the strongest supercomputer.
Since 2013, China has introduced Tianhe 2A and Sunway one after another, overtaking the United States until 2017 to occupy the supercomputer throne for four years. Currently, 173 of the world's top 500 supercomputers are from China, far more than the 126 from the United States. Although the number of supercomputers is small, Japan is also one of the world's most powerful countries in this field. Japan's supercomputer Fugaku surpassed IBM's Summit in June 2020 to take first place.
Computing power more than doubled compared to the previous No. 1
Recently, the United States took back the throne for the first time in two years by raising the performance of supercoms by one level.
At the '2022 International Supercomputing Conference' held in Hamburg, Germany at the end of May, Supercomputer Frontier of the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory was selected as the world's fastest supercomputer, beating out Japan's Fugaku. In particular, for the first time ever, Frontier demonstrated exascale computing power in an official performance evaluation.
In this evaluation, the number of operations per second of the frontier measured in this evaluation is 1.102 exaflops (1 exa = about 100). Supercom evaluates performance in terms of 'FLOPS', which refers to the number of floating-point operations that can be processed per second. 1.102 exaflops means 110 to 2,000 trillion calculations per second. Assuming that one person solves one multiplication problem per second, it is equivalent to the number of problems that 7.9 billion people in the world can solve in four and a half years. One supercomputer can finish the math problem book that everyone on Earth has to work on for four and a half years in one second.
This is more than twice as fast as the previous champion, Fugaku. Fugaku showed an actual measurement performance of 442 petaflops (44 around 2,000 trillion times, 1 peta = 1,000 trillion) in an evaluation in November last year. The performance of a single frontier takes up a quarter of the total computing power of the Top 500 supercomputers.
Supercomputers are also useful for running the latest artificial intelligence algorithms. In the case of Frontier, it recorded a maximum of 6.88 exaflops in calculation speed based on the type of computing used in machine learning. Japan's Fugaku also shows Exa-level performance in this sector.
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Oak Ridge National Laboratory is currently working to verify the performance of the Frontier. When this process is completed, Frontier is expected to enter full operation in early 2023.
Frontier, which gave America the title of the strongest supercomputer again, was made by Hewlett-Packard Enterprises and consists of a total of 74 cabinets. It contains 9,400 CPUs and 37,000 GPUs manufactured by AMD. The total number of cores is 8.73 million, which is 1 million times that of a general laptop PC (5 to 9 cores). Each cabinet alone weighs 8,000 pounds (3.6 tons).
Thomas Zacharia, director of the Oak Ridge Research Institute, said, “The production of Frontier has been difficult due to COVID-19, but in the future, Frontier will be able to play a major role in studying the impact of COVID-19 and helping the transition to a clean energy source.”
The scientific community expects exascale supercomputers to show new achievements in science fields that require very complex calculations. The institute plans to use Frontier to simulate the birth and explosion of stars, analyze the properties of the world of particles smaller than atoms, search for new energy sources such as nuclear fusion, and diagnose and predict diseases using artificial intelligence.
Frontier took first place in the Green 500, which evaluates the energy efficiency of computers, with 62.68 gigaflops per watt.
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