Frontier — World’s First ExaFLOPS Supercomputer

A race began around 2010 among many countries to build a supercomputer that would breach the ExaFLOPS (10 18 floatingpoint operations per second) barrier, a formidable goal. Frontier, a supercomputer designed by a team of engineers from Cray-HPE and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, achieved this goal in May 2022. It executed the HPLinpack benchmark program at a speed of 1.102 ExaFLOPS. In this article, I trace the events leading up to the design of Frontier and its architecture. I also describe various benchmarks used to compare the speeds of high-performance computers.