One day in the life of the fastest supercomputer in the world.

In the hills of eastern Tennessee, a record machine called Frontier provides scientists with unprecedented opportunities to study everything from atoms to galaxies.

Oak Ridge, Tennessee

The fastest supercomputer in the world is a machine called Frontier, but even this speedster with almost 50,000 processors has its limits. On a sunny April Monday, his energy consumption increases dramatically as he tries to cope with the amount of work requested by scientific groups around the world.

Electricity demand reaches a peak of about 27 megawatts, which is enough to provide electricity to about 10,000 homes, says Bronson Messer, scientific director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, where Frontier is located. With a touch of pride in his voice, Messer uses a local term to describe the speed of the supercomputer: "They drive the car like a scalded dog."

Frontier processes data at record speed, ahead of 100,000 simultaneously operating laptops. When he debuted in 2022, he was the first to overcome the exaflops speed barrier of supercomputers - the ability to perform exaflops, or 1018 floating point operations per second. The Oak Ridge giant is the latest leader in the long-standing global trend of creating larger supercomputers (although it is possible that faster computers exist in military laboratories or other secret facilities).

But speed and size are secondary to the main goal of Frontier - to expand the boundaries of human knowledge. Frontier succeeds in creating simulations that record large-scale patterns with small details, such as how tiny droplets of clouds can affect the rate of warming of the Earth's climate. Researchers use a supercomputer to create advanced models of everything from subatomic particles to galaxies. Some projects model proteins for the development of new drugs, model turbulence to improve the design of aircraft engines and create open source large language (LLM) models to compete with artificial intelligence (AI) tools from Google and OpenAI.

Researchers come to Frontier from all over the world. In 2023, the supercomputer had 1,744 users in 18 countries. And in 2024, Oak Ridge expects Frontier users to publish at least 500 articles based on machine-based calculations.

"Frontier is not much different from the James Webb space telescope," says biophysicist Dilip Astagiri from the Oakridge National Laboratory. "We should consider it as a scientific tool."