Cray

The US Department of Energy's Frontier supercomputer has been crowned world's fastest at the International Supercomputing Conference 2022 in Hamburg, Germany, and is the first system to enter the exascale era of computing.

The USA has gained ground in the world supercomputer rankings, with 116 supercomputers listed among the top 500, but China continues to dominate the list with 219 top-500 supercomputers.

Supercomputers will take a huge leap forward when the “exascale” era kicks off in 2021 with the launch of Aurora. But now it looks like that world-leading machine will be usurped before it’s even set up. The Frontier system has been announced, which will boast the power of over 1.5 exaflops.

Intel and the US Department of Energy will deliver the world’s first exascale supercomputer in 2021, boosting many different fields of research. Named Aurora, the new system will be a thousand times more powerful than the petascale generation that began in 2008 and is still in wide use today.