A DAY WITH THE WORLD'S FASTEST SUPERCOMPUTER

The electricity demand peaks at around 27 megawatts, enough to power roughly 10,000 houses, says Bronson Messer, director of science at the Leadership Computing Facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, where Frontier is located. Researchers are using the supercomputer to create cutting-edge models of everything from subatomic particles to galaxies. Frontier's galaxy models span four orders of magnitude, up to large-scale galactic structures about 100,000 light years (30,660 parsecs) in size. Over time, thousands to millions of supernova explosions collectively release a significant amount of gas that ultimately exits the galaxy3. Because that gas is the raw material from which new stars are born, star formation slows down as the galaxies age.