The Construction and Uses of Exascale Computing
Definition of Exascale
Science computing and Government computing such as weather forecasting had been using computers up to 50 pentaflops, where a pentaflop means 10^15 floating point operations a second, such as multiplying two decimal numbers together. A new computer named Frontier at Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee has now achieved 1.1 exaflops, or 1.1×10^18 flops, 20 times faster. This is Exascale computing. It’s cost is $600 million.
Exascale computers are also at Argonne National Lab in Illinois “Aurora”, and Lawrence Livermore National Lab in California “El Capitan”. They are also being built in Germany (JUPITER), France, and Japan.
Uses of Exascale Computing
“Projects already planned for Frontier include research into cancer, drug discovery, nuclear fusion, exotic materials, superefficient engines, and stellar explosions. The aim of the machine is to speed the time required for such work from weeks to hours and from hours to seconds.”
“The presence of the Frontier supercomputer has already changed this. The Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM) project overcomes these obstacles by combining new software approaches with immense exascale performance. Sarat Sreepathi, co-author of the research and coordinator of the E3SM project, as well as co-author of the E3SM atmospheric model called SCREAM, explains: “The climate modeling community has long dreamed of running kilometer-scale models at a speed sufficient to facilitate decade-scale predictions, and now it has become a reality.””
“Supercomputer simulations are essential to an ever-growing list of NASA initiatives. These include jet aircraft noise reduction, green aviation advancement, simulating the aerodynamic stability of the capsule that will deliver a quadcopter to the surface of Saturn’s largest moon, and supporting satellite investigations of planets orbiting deep-space star systems.”
The France-EU computer “will help solve societal challenges in several areas, such as energy (e.g. support fusion energy development), health (e.g. fast analysis of genomic data for virus mutations, rapid disease detection), and management of climate change (e.g. providing high-resolution weather forecast models). It will also advance our capabilities in quantum computing simulation.”
Parallel Processing and Exascale Computer Construction
A key breakthrough in computing is to use simultaneous or parallel processing as in Graphical Processing Units (GPUs) where all of the pixels of a screen are processed at the same time. The processors are called “cores”.
“Frontier uses 9,472 AMD Ерус 7713 “Trento” 64 core 2 GHz CPUs (606,208 cores) and 37,888 Instinct MI250X GPUs (8,335,360 cores)” (220 cores per GPU). “They can perform double-precision operations at the same speed as single precision.” 95% of their performance is from the GPUs.
A picture of the Frontier Exascale computer. There are 74 such Cray cabinets as in the picture.
For comparison, the newest Apple MacBook Air uses an 8 core CPU and a 10 core GPU. These are turboboosted up to 3.8 GHz (3.8×10^9 per second).
