Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is a U.S. multiprogram science and technology national laboratory sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and administered, managed, and operated by UT–Battelle as a federally funded research and development center (FFRDC) under a contract with the DOE, located in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
The ORNL scientific programs focus on materials, nuclear science, neutron science, energy, high-performance computing, systems biology and national security, sometimes in partnership with the state of Tennessee, universities and other industries.
ORNL has several of the world’s top supercomputers, including Frontier, first exascale computer in the United States and the world.
A typical laptop is only capable of a few teraflops, or a trillion operations per second, which is a million times less. The exaflop machine, called Frontier, could help solve a range of complex scientific problems, such as accurate climate modeling, nuclear fusion simulation and drug discovery.
“Frontier will offer modeling and simulation capabilities at the highest level of computing performance,” says Thomas Zacharia at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
The Frontier computing system is housed in 74 separate cabinets, comprising 9400 CPUs, or standard computer processors, and 37,000 GPUs, which are processors designed to render 3D graphics but can also be used for a range of other tasks.
This means the machine has a total of 8,730,112 cores capable of parallel computing tasks; a typical laptop has between five and nine. At peak power, the computer generates so much heat that it requires four high-powered pumps to push more than 25,000 litres of water around the machine each minute.
According to newscientist.com; en. Wikipedia. Source of photo: internet
