Frontier: Exploring Exascale

Scott Atchley; Christopher Zimmer; John Lange; David E. Bernholdt; Verónica G. Melesse Vergara; Thomas Beck; Michael J. Brim; Reuben D. Budiardja; Sunita Chandrasekaran; Markus Eisenbach; Thomas M. Evans; Matthew Ezell; Nicholas Frontiere; Antigoni Georgiadou; Joe Glenski; Philipp Grete; Steven P. Hamilton; John K. Holmen; Axel Huebl; Daniel A. Jacobson; Wayne Joubert; Kim H. McMahon; Elia Merzari; Stan G. Moore; Andrew Myers; Stephen Nichols; Sarp Oral; Thomas Papatheodore; Danny Perez; David M. Rogers; Evan Schneider; Jean-Luc Vay; P. K. Yeung

doi:10.1145/3581784.3607089

SC2023Top-tier venue

Frontier: Exploring Exascale

Scott Atchley, Christopher Zimmer, John Lange, David E. Bernholdt, Verónica G. Melesse Vergara, Thomas Beck, Michael J. Brim, Reuben D. Budiardja, Sunita Chandrasekaran, Markus Eisenbach, Thomas M. Evans, Matthew Ezell

DOI Publisher

2023Year

91Citations

5Top-tier citations

Abstract

As the US Department of Energy (DOE) computing facilities began deploying petascale systems in 2008, DOE was already setting its sights on exascale. In that year, DARPA published a report on the feasibility of reaching exascale. The report authors identified several key challenges in the pursuit of exascale including power, memory, concurrency, and resiliency. That report informed the DOE's computing strategy for reaching exascale. With the deployment of Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Frontier supercomputer, we have officially entered the exascale era. In this paper, we discuss Frontier's architecture, how it addresses those challenges, and describe some early application results from Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility's Center of Excellence and the Exascale Computing Project.