“Exascale” sounds like a science-fiction term, but it has a simple and very nonfictional definition: while a human brain can perform about one simple mathematical operation per second, an exascale computer can do at least one quintillion calculations in the time it takes to say, “One Mississippi.”
In 2022 the world’s first declared exascale computer, Frontier, came online at Oak Ridge National Laboratory—and it’s 2.5 times faster than the second-fastest-ranked computer in the world. It will soon have better competition (or peers), though, from incoming examachines such as El Capitan, housed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and Aurora, which will reside at Argonne National Laboratory.
It’s no coincidence that all of these machines find themselves at facilities whose names end with the words “national laboratory.” The new computers are projects of the Department of Energy and its National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). The DOE oversees these labs and a network of others across the country. NNSA is tasked with keeping watch over the nuclear weapons stockpile, and some of exascale computing’s raison d’être is to run calculations that help maintain that arsenal. But the supercomputers also exist to solve intractable problems in pure science.
When scientists are finished commissioning Frontier, which will be dedicated to such fundamental research, they hope to illuminate core truths in various fields—such as learning about how energy is produced, how elements are made and how the dark parts of the universe spur its evolution—all through almost-true-to-life simulations in ways that wouldn’t have been possible even with the nothing-to-sniff-at supercomputers of a few years ago.
“In principle, the community could have developed and deployed an exascale supercomputer much sooner, but it would not have been usable, useful and affordable by our standards,” says Douglas Kothe, associate laboratory director of computing and computational sciences at Oak Ridge. Obstacles such as huge-scale parallel processing, exaenergy consumption, reliability, memory and storage—along with a lack of software to start running on such supercomputers—stood in the way of those standards. Years of focused work with the high-performance computing industry lowered those barriers to finally satisfy scientists.
Frontier can process seven times faster and hold four times more information in memory than its predecessors. It is…
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at Scientific American Content: Global…