In May 2022, the global supercomputer rankings were shaken up by the launch of Frontier. Now the fastest supercomputer in the world, it can perform more than 1 quintillion (1018) floating-point operations per second. That’s a 1 followed by 18 zeros, also known as an exaflop. Essentially, Frontier can perform as many calculations in one second as 100,000 laptops.
With the launch of Frontier, located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, the era of exascale computing officially began. Several more such exascale computers will soon join its ranks. In the US, researchers are installing two machines that will be about twice as fast as Frontier: El Capitan, at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, and Aurora, at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. Europe’s first exascale supercomputer, Jupiter, is expected to come online in late 2024. China reportedly also has exascale machines, although it has not released results from standard benchmark tests.