Frontier SuperComputer 1,5 exaflops the second with AMD

Frontier by AMD: The fastest supercomputer in the world will be built in the US until 2021, the United States Department of Energy announced today.

The machine, named Frontier, will be built by chip maker AMD and Cray supercomputer maker for the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.

It is expected to produce more than 1,5 processing power exaflops per second and will be used for a series of tasks, advanced calculations in areas such as nuclear and climate research.

When built the Frontier will be the most advanced example of what is known as "exascal computing".

This is the next generation of computational capacity, in which processing power is measured in exaflops or quintillions calculations per second. A quintillion has eight zeros behind it: 1.000.000.000.000.000.000.

To give an idea of ​​the scale of this kind of systems, AMD reports that Frontier will have the same processing dynamics as the next 160 faster supercomputers combined.

It will be able to manage amazing amounts of data, with 24.000.000 bandwidth times larger than the average home internet connection. The super computer will be able to process 100.000 HD movies per second.

Of course, to accommodate this particular computer will need two basketball stadiums and 90 miles of cables.

Frontier is not the only computer that the US is currently manufacturing. Earlier this year, the Ministry of Energy announced a similar project for the construction of the Aurora supercomputer, manufactured at the Argonne National Laboratory. Aurora will probably be the first state-of-the-art computer in the US, but Frontier will have much more processing power.

However, these systems may not be the first supercomputers in the world, as China is expected to have its own supercomputer up to 2020.

The above news is a big deal for AMD, according to Patrick Moorhead, semiconductor analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy at TheVerge, as the US company has not supplied supercomputer chips worldwide since 2012, when AMD Opteron processors were used in the supercomputer. of ORNL, Titan with a processing power of 17,59 petaflops per second.

Moorhead said at TheVerge that the Ministry of Energy chose AMD for a variety of reasons, such as its processor performance and the company's recent successes when designing the semi-custom for Microsoft and Sony.

"This is good for AMD's future, as it is a technology that will be in the mainstream market after 2021," says Moorhead.