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A day in the life of the world’s fastest supercomputer

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2024-09-05 00:00:08

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The fastest supercomputer in the world is a machine known as Frontier, but even this speedster with nearly 50,000 processors has its limits. On a sunny Monday in April, its power consumption is spiking as it tries to keep up with the amount of work requested by scientific groups around the world.

The electricity demand peaks at around 27 megawatts, enough to power roughly 10,000 houses, says Bronson Messer, director of science at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, where Frontier is located. With a note of pride in his voice, Messer uses a local term to describe the supercomputer’s work rate: “They are running the machine like a scalded dog.”

Frontier churns through data at record speed, outpacing 100,000 laptops working simultaneously. When it debuted in 2022, it was the first to break through supercomputing’s exascale speed barrier — the capability of executing an exaflop, or 1018 floating point operations per second. The Oak Ridge behemoth is the latest chart-topper in a decades-long global trend of pushing towards larger supercomputers (although it is possible that faster computers exist in military labs or otherwise secret facilities).