"A new supercomputer called Frontier is being touted as the world's first exascale machine. But is it really? ”
That's the question explored in a new article in New Scientist…
Although the Frontier, built by Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, is at the top of the list of supercomputers, there may already be others who have achieved this milestone in secret.
The list of supercomputers is published by Top 500, which uses only one measurement with the software LINPACK benchmarks: how fast can a machine solve huge numbers of equations.
This gives a value of floating point operations per second or FLOPS (from float-point operations per second).
Even Jack Dongarra from the Top500 admits that not all supercomputers are included as they can only be displayed if their owners run the LINPACK benchmark and submit the result.
"If they do not send it, it does not come in, and I can not force them."
Some homeowners prefer not to publish benchmarks and not to publicly disclose the existence of a machine.
Simon McIntosh-Smith at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom says that not only intelligence services but also some companies keep their machines secret. Some academic machines, such as Blue Waters, which operates from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, have simply never been listed.
Dongarra says supercomputers believe China has at least two exascale engines in operation since 2021, known as OceanLight and Tianhe-3. According to experts, there is an even bigger one in China called Sugon. Scientific work on unrelated research has revealed elements of these machines when describing the calculations made on them.
McIntosh-Smith also believes that intelligence services would have a very good ranking in the 500 list, if allowed.
"Certainly in the US, some of the security forces have machines that would put them on top."
George is still wondering what he is doing here….
