Frontier: Meet the world's most powerful supercomputer

Imagine if you had a device that could solve your query in a millionth of a time than your normal laptop. That’s a supercomputer,  the fastest of the fastest computer. A supercomputer is used for solving complex data and problems. US’s Frontier supercomputer, launched recently in June 2022, is the father of all supercomputers and has broken all earlier records earning itself the tag of currently the fastest supercomputer in the world.  

Frontier dethrones Fugaku  
Till last year, Japan’s Fugaku held the crown but with the fast-moving technology and countries racing to develop their fastest machines, US’s Frontier recently dethroned Fugaku as the world’s fastest and most powerful supercomputer.  

Frontier is more than twice as fast as Fugaku. Built for the US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), this supercomputer is the first to achieve an unprecedented level of computing performance known as exascale, a threshold of a quintillion calculations per second.  

It features a total of 8,730,112 cores and is designed on the newest HPE Cray EX235a architecture with AMD EPYC 64C 2GHz processors. Frontier is also ranked number one as the world’s most energy-efficient supercomputer that is it will use much lesser power.  

History of supercomputers  
There have always been "wow that's fast!" computers, but we didn't start calling them supercomputers until 1964 when Seymour Cray designed the first such machine, CDC 6600. 

They were highly tuned conventional designs that ran more quickly than their more general-purpose contemporaries. From then until today, massively parallel supercomputers with tens of thousands of off-the-shelf processors became the norm. 

The US has long been the leader in the supercomputer field, first through Cray's almost uninterrupted dominance of the field, and later through a variety of technology companies. Japan made major strides in the field in the 1980s and 90s, with China becoming increasingly active in this arena.  

How supercomputers are changing lives  
Supercomputers help scientists and researchers in more ways than you can even imagine. From predicting superstorms and understanding climate change to developing and enhancing life-like animation environments for blockbuster films like those seen in Disney’s Frozen, Tangled and Big Hero 6, supercomputer uses are many. From toothpaste to diapers to dish soap, companies are using supercomputers to create better, more efficient, more cost-effective products and services.  

Frontier, according to scientists, will help them to develop critically needed technologies for energy, economic and national security, helping researchers address problems of national importance that were impossible to solve just five years ago.