The US Department of Energy (DoE) has announced it’s setting aside $600 million to build the world’s fastest supercomputer called Frontier. It will be jointly developed by AMD and Seattle-based supercomputer specialist Cray. The Frontier supercomputer will be capable of completing more than 1.5 quintillion calculations per second, and will join Aurora to become the second of the two exascale systems planned by US DoE for 2021. To give a sense of scale, a quintillion is a billion billion, or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000. The machine, upon completion in Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), will be about 10 times faster than the current fastest supercomputer, dubbed Summit,…

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