Very big computer made
It’s the first to break the “exaflop ceiling.”
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In a surprise upset of 21st century technology norms, Oak Ridge National Laboratory has made a computer that is, in fact, very large. The Frontier supercomputer is too big to fit in a pocket or a backpack, like today’s most popular computers, and it is also too big to fit in a mid-tower PC case, which can comfortably hold an RTX 3090. How much bigger could a computer really need to be?
Much bigger, insists Oak Ridge National Laboratory.ORNL’s Frontierhas been heralded as the “first true exascale machine,” setting a record for performance of 1.02 exaflops per second on a high-performance benchmark. An exaflop is one quintillion floating point operations per second, and if you’re not sure how big a quintillion is, it’s a million million millions, aka a billion billions. NASA estimates that the Milky Way is one quintillion kilometers across.
So, pretty big.
Frontier set the exaflop record using AMD’s 64-core 2GHz Epyc processors, whichyou can buy yourselffor only $8,000 or so. But you’ll need a few of them, because the Frontier has a total of 8,730,112 cores.
That’s 136,408 AMD Epyc processors. This computer is unfashionably large: it will not fit under your desk, or even in your house unless you knock down several walls or have a much bigger house than I do.
The Frontier supercomputer is also remarkably efficient despite filling up multiple server banks, each bigger than Andre the Giant. Frontier isnow #1on the Top 500 supercomputer list and the Green 500, which rates for performance per watt.
Here are some more big numbers:
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Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites likeThe WirecutterandTestedbefore joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he’ll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.
When he’s not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it’s really becoming a problem), he’s probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).
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