USA presents first supercomputer with performance above one exaflop

New records are regularly set in the field of supercomputers. Up to now, Japan has been ahead in this respect, but the competition never sleeps. The USA has now secured the top position and presented the first supercomputer of its own with a performance in the exaflop range.

New record holder is called “Frontier”

A look at the top list of the world’s supercomputers is truly impressive. It is not only the pure performance that is astonishing, but also the sometimes significant differences between the individual models. Especially the top positions are separated by gigantic performance differences. With Frontier, the USA has now produced the new first-place winner. The supercomputer has a theoretical performance of 1.686 exaflops and a practical performance of 1.102 exaflops. This beats the current front-runner by a long way. It comes from Japan, is called Fugaku and achieves 442 petaflops of practical performance, which is considerably less than Frontier. If you take a look at third place, the difference is similarly clear. This is held by the Finnish-built Lumi, which is only half as powerful as the Japanese.

China is the secret front-runner

The ranking with the most powerful supercomputers is only an unofficial top 500. What the reality looks like cannot be reliably read from it. After all, it is not in the interest of all countries to know globally about their computing power. However, it is an open secret that Frontier’s new record is not actually a record. After all, it is speculated that China alone has two supercomputers, which in turn can offer over an exaflop of performance. The more powerful of the two systems from the Far East, with a theoretical performance of 1.7 exaflops and a practical performance of 1.3 exaflops, is said to significantly outperform Frontier once again.