Cray and AMD Announce Plans for World’s Fastest Supercomputer

Cray, AMD, and the US Department of Energy have announced plans for a 1.5 exaflop supercomputer for Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). The new system, which is dubbed Frontier, is expected to be the fastest exascale-class supercomputer in the world. The system will use custom AMD EPYC CPUs with AMD Radeon Instinct GPU processors and will be used for studying “weather, sub-atomic structures, genomics, physics, and other important scientific fields.”
The Frontier system will be optimized for AI and will make use of low-latency, coherent Infinity fabric connecting four AMD Radeon GPUs to one CPU per node. The system will also leverage AMD’s ROCm programming environment to optimize performance and promote easy migration of existing GPU-optimized software.