The U.S. Is Now Home to the World’s Fastest Supercomputer

In a big win for the United States, the Department of Energy’s Frontier supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee was ranked No. 1 in the Top500 worldwide performance contest and the first to top the quintillion operations-per-second (exascale) benchmark in a LINPACK test. The Department of Energy has said it will spend a total of $1.8 billion to build three machines with exascale performance. The Frontier, or OLCF-5, supercomputer (which features a theoretical peak performance of 2 exaflops) was built by Hewlett Packard Enterprise and is powered by AMD chips. Continue reading The U.S. Is Now Home to the World’s Fastest Supercomputer

Academic Supercomputer Is Unveiled by Intel and Dell EMC

Dell EMC and Intel introduced Frontera, an academic supercomputer that replaces Stampede2 at the University of Texas at Austin’s Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC). The companies announced plans to build the computer in August 2018 and were funded by a $60 million National Science Foundation grant. According to Intel, Frontera’s peak performance can reach 38.7 quadrillion floating point operations per second (petaflops), making it one of the fastest such computers for modeling, simulation, big data and machine learning. Continue reading Academic Supercomputer Is Unveiled by Intel and Dell EMC