AMD and Cray Inc., to Enable World’s Fastest Exascale-class Supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory
June 5, 2019
AMD joined the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and Cray Inc. in announcing what is expected to be the world’s fastest exascale-class supercomputer, scheduled to be delivered to ORNL in 2021. To deliver what is expected to be more than 1.5 exaflops of processing performance, the Frontier system is designed to use future generation High-Performance Computing (HPC) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) optimized, custom AMD EPYC™ CPU, and AMD Radeon™ Instinct GPU processors. Researchers at ORNL will use the Frontier system’s unprecedented computing power and next-generation AI techniques to simulate, model and advance understanding of the interactions underlying the science of weather, sub-atomic structures, genomics, physics, and other important scientific fields.
“AMD is proud to partner with Cray and ORNL to deliver what is expected to be the world’s most powerful supercomputer. Frontier will feature custom CPU and GPU technology from AMD and represents the latest achievement on a long list of technology innovations AMD has contributed to the Department of Energy exascale programs.” –Forrest Norrod, senior vice president and general manager, AMD Datacenter and Embedded Systems Group
AMD innovations to be used in the Frontier system include:
“We are excited to work with the team at AMD to deliver the Frontier system to Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Cray’s Shasta supercomputers are designed to support leading-edge processor technologies and high-performance storage, all tightly interconnected by Cray’s new Slingshot network. The combination of Cray and AMD technology in the Frontier system will dramatically enhance performance at scale for AI, analytics, and simulation, enabling DOE to further push the boundaries of scientific discovery.” –Steve Scott, senior vice president and CTO at Cray
AMD has a proud supercomputing history and a long-standing engagement with DOE, starting with the Jaguar supercomputer in 2005 and Titan supercomputer in 2011. The Frontier system leverages years of exascale technology investments by DOE. The contract award includes technology development funding, a center of excellence, several early-delivery systems, the main Frontier system and multi-year systems support.
“Frontier represents the state-of-the-art in high-performance computing. Designing and standing up a machine of its scope requires working closely with industry, partnerships which not only enable breakthrough science but also ensure American scientific and economic competitiveness on the global stage. We are delighted to work with AMD to integrate the CPU and GPU technologies that enable this extremely capable accelerated node architecture.” –Jeff Nichols, associate laboratory director for Computing and Computational Sciences, ORNL