A recent press release reports, “Cray Inc. and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today announced they are pushing forward the technology boundaries of computational science with the development of the “Frontier” exascale supercomputer for Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), expected to be delivered in 2021. The system will be based on Cray’s new Shasta™ architecture and Cray Slingshot™  interconnect and will feature future generation AMD EPYC CPU and Radeon Instinct GPU technology. This is the third major contract award for the Shasta architecture and Slingshot interconnect; previous awards were for the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center’s NERSC-9 pre-exascale system, and the Argonne National Laboratory’s Aurora exascale system.”

The release continues, “Shasta supercomputers are set to be the technology underpinning the exascale era, which is characterized by a deluge of new data and a convergence of modeling, simulation, analytics, and AI workloads. To enable this fusion of workloads to run simultaneously across the system, Slingshot was designed to incorporate intelligent features like adaptive routing, quality-of-service, and congestion management. Frontier will utilize Cray’s new Shasta system software for monitoring, orchestration, and application development to provide a single developer interface across the system. The new software stack is a fully containerized architecture that combines the scalability and performance of HPC while enabling the productivity and portability of cloud.”

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