The most powerful supercomputer ever to exist sits on the leafy campus of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a US Department of Energy facility in Tennessee. The $600mn machine, called Frontier, consists of 74 cabinets, each as heavy as a truck, cooled by 6,000 gallons of water a minute and strung together with 90 miles of networking cable.
It is also the first recorded supercomputer capable of an exaflop per second — a billion billion operations. We’ve reached exascale, long a holy grail of computing.
This feat earned Frontier a place atop this month’s TOP500, a twice yearly list of the 500 fastest supercomputers in the world. With furious regularity, the machines on the list have been accelerating. Note the logarithmic scale necessary to handle this awesome growth.