World’s fastest supercomputer will be built by AMD and Cray for US government
Frontier isn’t the only exascale computer the US is currently building either. Earlier this year, the Department of Energy announced a similar project: the supercomputer Aurora, which is being constructed by Intel and Cray at Argonne National Laboratory. Aurora will likely be the first exascale supercomputer in the US, but Frontier will have greater processing power.
These machines don’t necessarily mean the US is the world’s greater computing power, though. China is expected to have its own exascale supercomputer up and running by 2020 — a year ahead of America. China is also the world’s leader in terms of supercomputer volume, and is currently home to 227 of the world’s fastest computers (compared to just 109 operated by the US). Japan and the European Union are the other main contenders.
The news is a particularly big deal for AMD, says Patrick Moorhead, semiconductor analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy. The contract is worth $600 million and Frontier will use scores of AMD’s EPYC CPUs, each connected to four of the company’s Radeon Instinct GPUs.
The world of supercomputer chips is mostly in the hands of Intel, and AMD hasn’t supplied the processors for the world’s fastest supercomputer since 2012, when AMD Opteron CPUs were used to push ORNL’s Titan computer to a benchmark of 17.59 petaflops per second.
Moorhead told The Verge that the Department of Energy likely chose AMD for a number of reasons, including the performance of its processors, and its recent successes designing semi-custom silicon for Microsoft and Sony. “This bodes well for AMD’s future as this is technology that should be in the mainstream market after 2021,” said Moorhead.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/7/18535078/worlds-fastest-exascale-supercomputer-frontier-amd-cray-doe-oak-ridge-national-laboratory