Oak Ridge National Laboratory Prepares for Its Exascale Supercomputer

At the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, scientists work with the largest supercomputer in the United States to untangle complex scientific mysteries that could take years to understand without the help of the machine. Summit has served ORNL well, but now the lab is preparing to upgrade to an even speedier supercomputer named Frontier, expected to be at least five times as fast as Summit. As is the case with any IT upgrade, detailed planning is required — especially when the technology being deployed may become the fastest supercomputer in the world.

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• Justin Whitt, Program Director, Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility
• Bronson Messer, Director of Science, Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, U.S. Department of Energy
• Dan Jacobson, Chief Scientist for Computational Biology, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
• Shih-Chieh Kao, Hydrologist, Oak Ridge National Laboratory

• The Summit supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory is the largest in the U.S. and second-largest in the world.
• It operates at speeds hundreds of times faster than commercially available computers, and is able to make about 200 quadrillion calcuations per second.
• ORNL is preparing to upgrade to an even more speedy machine, the supercomputer Frontier, which will be about five times faster than Summit.