From CNET: The US has reclaimed the top spot on the list of the world's most powerful computers with the first supercomputer to cross the exascale performance threshold. The AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory topped 1.1 exaflops, or 1.1 quintillion calculations per second, on the Linmark benchmark, the lab announced Monday.
The Hewlett Packard Enterprise-built machine handily beat out the previous record holder, Fugaku, which registered a peak computational performance last year of 442 petaflops -- less than half the speed of the Frontier. The IBM-built Summit machine was the world's fastest supercomputer for two years before the Japanese-made Fugaku claimed the title in June 2020.
"Frontier is ushering in a new era of exascale computing to solve the world's biggest scientific challenges," Oak Ridge National Laboratory Director Thomas Zacharia said in a statement. "This milestone offers just a preview of Frontier's unmatched capability as a tool for scientific discovery."
Supercomputers, mammoth machines that can take up entire floors of buildings and consume as much power as a town, are used for tasks like simulating nuclear weapons explosions, global climate change effects and the physics of the cosmos. They also can be good at medical research like drug discovery, a key ability given the fast spread of diseases such as COVID-19.
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