AMD-Powered Frontier Supercomputer Tops Top500 At 1.1 Exaflops, Tops Green500 Too

As part of ISC 2022 happening this week in Hamburg, Germany, the new Top500 supercomputer and Green500 energy efficiency lists have been published.

Since 2020 the Fugaku supercomputer in Japan has took top spot with its Fujitsu A64FX SoCs. While that Arm supercomputer has held the top spot for the past two years, Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Frontier supercomputer has succeeded it and returns x86_64 back to the top spot combined with AMD Instinct GPU-based accelerators.

Frontier also marks the first supercomputer to break the Exascale computing barrier. Frontier comes in at 1.102 Exaflops of performance to top the Top500 list and at 62.68 gigaflops/Watt also puts it as the most efficient supercomputer to also come out number one in the Green500 list.

Frontier makes use of AMD EPYC Milan processors and AMD Instinct MI250x accelerators. Frontier is still undergoing testing and validation while ORNL expects final acceptance and actual scientific work to begin later in 2022.

ORNL photo of Frontier under construction.

The new LUMI supercomputer also now is in spot three on the Top500 and Green500 lists as another AMD EPYC + AMD Instinct powered combination.

AMD is also celebrating this morning their achievements in that there is a 28% list-over-list increase in AMD EPYC-based supercomputers and a 95% year-over-year increase with AMD EPYC now found in 94 of the Top500 list. AMD also is powering half of the top 10 fastest supercomputers and 20 of tne 38 new systems on the list. AMD also is powering the four most power efficient supercomputers in the world according to the new Green500 list.

The updated Top500 list should be available now at Top500.org with the embargo just expiring.