ORNL’s Frontier breaks the exaflop ceiling

This filled me with nostalgia. I remember how excited I was -- maybe even in awe -- when, in 2008, IBM's Roadrunner broke the PetaFLOPS barrier and was the first computer to do so. That's not even that long ago.

At the time of the last list, there were two systems in China that had recently broken this barrier, but their owners have chosen not to submit benchmarks to the Top500.

Anyone less familiar with the field should be aware that it’s widely known that the benchmark used for this list (multiplying two huge dense matrices) is not representative of many real use cases in scientific computing. So while it’s fun to push this one number higher, one has to ask if it’s really worth the incredible amount of money involved, when it’s something of a drag race.

Apparently the first petaflops computer was Roadrunner in 2008 [1]<p>So the supercomputer speed went 1000x from 2008-2022. But home computer speeds definitely did not go up that much, it was maybe around 10x. Does this mean there is more potential for home computers in the future?<p>Of course the supercomputers are massively parallel, but it&#x27;s not like they got a 100x times larger building, or do they?<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Roadrunner_(supercomputer)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Roadrunner_(supercomputer)</a>

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;EEw1x#selection-1515.0-1518.0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;EEw1x#selection-1515.0-1518.0</a>

More info about Frontier here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.olcf.ornl.gov&#x2F;frontier&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.olcf.ornl.gov&#x2F;frontier&#x2F;</a>

21 Megawatts of power to run at full capacity. Wow! About the same power consumption as 16,000 homes. I’m not saying it’s a bad use of power, just that it’s impressive.

top500.org is down. That seems unnecessary.<p>Was going to say that it&#x27;s always great to see GPU machines performing well. Looking forward to seeing how far off theoretical peak the benchmark hit.