AMD and Cray unveiled what is expected to be the world’s fastest supercomputer – defining a new standard for high-performance computing and pushing the technology boundaries of computational science to take the industry into the Exascale era. This new system is called Frontier and is planned to come online in the U.S. in 2021 with over 1.5 exaflops of processing power. And at first glance, that honestly looks like a lot of flops.
Together with the Cray Shasta architecture, AMD is excited to build on leadership hardware and software with the singular goal of solving computing challenges we face in the world today.
AMD innovations to be used in the Frontier system include:
- Future-generation High Performance Computing (HPC) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) optimized, custom AMD EPYC CPU, and Radeon Instinct GPU processors supported by High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) and extensive mixed precision ops for optimum deep learning performance;
- A custom high-bandwidth, low-latency coherent Infinity Fabric, connecting four AMD Radeon Instinct GPUs to one AMD EPYC CPU per node;
- An enhanced version of the open source ROCm programming environment, developed with Cray to tap into the combined performance of AMD CPUs and GPUs.
With this announcement, AMD and Cray are driving a new HPC paradigm to support the complex compute, interconnect, software and storage requirements that Exascale computing demands.
The Frontier is expected to set the stage for the future of high-performance and exascale computing, dramatically enhancing performance at scale for AI, analytics and simulation.
