The Frontier supercomputer includes some of the world’s most advanced technologies from AMD and HPE.
- Each node contains one optimized third-generation AMD EPYC processor and four AMD Instinct MI250X accelerators for a systemwide total of 9,408 CPUs and 37,632 GPUs. These nodes provide developers with ease of programming for their applications owing to the coherency enabled by the processors and accelerators.
- HPE’s Slingshot interconnect is the world’s only high-performance Ethernet fabric designed for HPC and artificial intelligence. By connecting several core components (e.g., CPUs, GPUs, high-performance storage), Slingshot enables larger data-intensive workloads that would otherwise be bandwidth-limited and provides higher speed and congestion control to ensure applications run smoothly. Owing to this unique configuration and expanded performance, teams have taken a thoughtful approach to scaling the interconnect to a massive supercomputer such as Frontier, made up of 74 HPE Cray EX cabinets, to ensure reliable performance across applications.
- An input/output subsystem from HPE was brought online this year to support Frontier and the OLCF. The I/O subsystem features an in-system storage layer and Orion, which is a Lustre-based, enhanced centerwide file system. The in-system storage layer will employ compute-node local storage devices connected via PCIe Gen4 links to provide peak read speeds of more than 75 terabytes per second, peak write speeds of more than 35 terabytes per second and more than 15 billion random-read I/O operations per second. The Orion centerwide file system will provide around 700 petabytes of storage capacity and peak write speeds of 5 terabytes per second.
- As a next-generation supercomputing system and the world’s fastest for open science, Frontier is also liquid cooled. This cooling system promotes a quieter data center by removing the need for a noisier, air-cooled system.
