The team that built Frontier set out to break the exascale barrier, but the supercomputer’s record-breaking didn’t stop there.
Making room for the world’s first exascale supercomputer took some supersized renovations.
The world’s first exascale supercomputer will help scientists peer into the future of global climate change and open a window into weather patterns that could affect the world a generation from now.
Raina Setzer knows the work she does matters. That’s because she’s already seen it from the other side. Setzer, a radiochemical processing technician in Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Isotope Processing and Manufacturing Division, joined the lab in June 2023.
A type of peat moss has surprised scientists with its climate resilience: Sphagnum divinum is actively speciating in response to hot, dry conditions.
To better understand important dynamics at play in flood-prone coastal areas, Oak Ridge National Laboratory scientists working on simulations of Earth’s carbon and nutrient cycles paid a visit to experimentalists gathering data in a Texas wetland.
In 1993 as data managers at ORNL began compiling observations from field experiments for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the information fit on compact discs and was mailed to users along with printed manuals.
As Frontier, the world’s first exascale supercomputer, was being assembled at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility in 2021, understanding its performance on mixed-precision calculations remained a difficult prospect.
Bob Bolton may have moved to a southerly latitude at ORNL, but he is still stewarding scientific exploration in the Arctic, along with a project that helps amplify the voices of Alaskans who reside in a landscape on the front lines of climate change.
Outside the high-performance computing, or HPC, community, exascale may seem more like fodder for science fiction than a powerful tool for scientific research. Yet, when seen through the lens of real-world applications, exascale computing goes from ethereal concept to tangible reality with exceptional benefits.