An exascale supercomputer called Frontier is now being installed and integrated at Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Leadership Computing Facility in Tennessee and some researchers are expected to gain access to the machine in the summer of 2022, Nextgov reported Thursday.
“Some early users will get access to Frontier this summer to help harden the system for full user operations on Jan. 1, 2023,” Justin Whitt, program director for the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, told the publication Wednesday.
In May 2019, the Department of Energy awarded Cray a potential $600 million contract to build the Frontier supercomputer, which will incorporate technologies from Advanced Micro Devices.
In September of the same year, Hewlett Packard Enterprise closed its acquisition of Cray four months after it first announced the deal.
Whitt said Frontier will not only provide simulation and modeling capabilities, but will also offer “unprecedented opportunities to utilize artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques for issues of global importance, like discovering new patterns in patient data for precision medicine uncovering the origins of disease, shedding light on new properties of materials, and advancing research in high-energy physics.”
