A company has introduced a new computer. In comparison, almost any gaming PC looks cute. What is inside the computer that weighs more than 3 tons?
The Oak Ridge National Laboratory has unveiled a computer of superlatives. It is hardly comparable to our gaming systems in terms of construction and performance. Nevertheless, it is impressive what is inside the ‘Frontier’.
New computer weighs more than 3 tons and needs 300,000 liters of water per minute
What is inside the computer? The computer from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory uses processors from AMD. Specifically, Epyc processors with 64 cores that clock at 2 GHz are used. The computer offers a total of 8,730,112 computing cores.
In many gaming PCs, processors with an average of 4 to 6 cores are used. The computer achieves a performance of 1.102 exaflops/s. That is a number that is hard to imagine; it is that huge. Flops describe the number of floating-point calculations that a processor can perform. An exaflop is one trillion floating-point calculations per second (ExaFLOPS = 10 to the power of 18 FLOPS).
The PS5, in comparison, achieves 10.15 teraflops, and a GeForce RTX 3080 achieves 29.8 teraflops. Both the graphics card and the console, however, are far from the performance of the supercomputer.
The computer is also featured in the following video:
The developers also state that the computer weighs more than 30,000 kilograms and requires around 300,000 liters of water per minute for cooling. In comparison: Gaming PCs rarely exceed 20 kg, and a computer typically uses 2 to 3 liters of liquid when using water cooling.
Frontier requires 7,300 square meters of space, which is not insignificant. A standard football field (68m x 105m) has an area of 7,140 sqm.
Significantly less space is needed for a gaming PC, which you can place on legs on your desk. Whether you really want that and what it costs in the end, you can read in our article:
How fast are comparable computers? The supercomputer ‘Frontier’ is currently considered the most powerful supercomputer in the world according to TOP500 (via top500.org). This list includes all fast computers. Previously, the supercomputer Fugaku from Japan led the top list.
Such supercomputers are used exclusively for professional purposes
What do you need so much computing power for? Such supercomputers or high-performance PCs have various areas of application. They are mainly used in research, where performance is needed for simulations, for example.
For example, their performance is used for weather predictions, for discovering oil and gas reserves, or for complex calculations in astrophysics or fusion research.
The fastest gaming PC in the world reaches 100 kilometers per hour
