On the territory of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) work is underway to install the American supercomputer Frontier . The power of the new system will be 1.5 exaflops. The project will be partially put into operation in the spring of 2021. Then the supercomputer will be completed - after the system starts working. Frontier will be housed in the former data center of the Titan supercomputer , which was decommissioned a year ago.
The Frontier system is being developed through a collaboration between AMD and Cray. For the first time, this project became known in May 2019. ORNL is now talking about the successful renovation of the former Titan's premises.
Frontier will be housed in room E102, with an area of> 1800 square meters. However, the new system needed modifications:
- reinforcement of structures due to the large mass of the system;
- increasing the capacity of power supply and cooling systems;
- replacement of the old raised floor.
Frontier Features:
- performance - 1.5 exaflops;
- power consumption - 30 MW;
- cooling system outlet capacity - 40 MW;
- > 100 racks of Cray Shasta;
- weight of the new raised floor in room E102 - 110 tons;
- 24-inch cooling piping. 19 thousand liters of liquid per minute passes through it.
Due to the pandemic, ORNL has undergone some changes. Thus, mandatory testing for coronavirus has been introduced for all employees. The launch of the supercomputer was postponed to 2022.
The main goal facing the developers of Frontier is to help accelerate the development of science, technology and artificial intelligence. The total value of the contract for the development of the system is $ 600 million.
A year ago, the ORNL laboratory announced that Frontier is 50 times more productive than any modern supercomputer. Frontier is expected to improve and open up new possibilities in machine learning and data analysis for various applications.
ORNL source has been developing and launching the world's most powerful supercomputers for several years now, including Jaguar , Titan and Summit . Their power is used for different purposes. For example, in May 2020, the "forces" of American supercomputers were sent to fight the coronavirus. They performed important calculations for doctors to obtain information about the genetic code and molecular structure of the virus.
Farewell to Titan
One and a half years ago, the Titan supercomputer was located in the room where the Frontier is now being assembled. The full name of the system is Cray XK7 Titan. The supercomputer occupied 200 server racks and had a hybrid infrastructure.
Its characteristics:
- 700 TB of RAM;
- 40 PB of disk storage;
- AMD Opteron 6274 16-core processors;
- graphics accelerators NVIDIA Tesla K20;
- from 4 to 6 MW - energy consumption level.
At the time of its decommissioning in August 2019, Titan was ranked 12th in the list of the most powerful supercomputers in the world.
The total area of the premises given over to Titan was 836 sq. meters. The dismantling of the equipment demanded special efforts. The Titan cooling systems contained 4.5 tons of R134a refrigerant. It took 3 days to drain it.
Dismantling took place in three stages:
- Disconnection of all circuits. Blocking the cooling circuits in the room.
- Disconnection of underground cable infrastructure.
- Removing heat exchangers of cooling systems from cabinets.
