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