World's 2nd fastest supercomputer runs largest-ever simulation of the universe

Side by side images show a splotch of green and blue in a black canvas with a red center, and a red yellow canvas on the right, with dark granules scattered around.

The world's second fastest supercomputer — it used to be the fastest, before its rival machine came online earlier this month — has created the most complex computer simulation of the universe to date. The goal of this simulation is to test what researchers describe as "cosmological hydrodynamics."

The supercomputer is known as Frontier, lives at Oak Ridge National Laboratory — and is a beast of a device. Built to be the first exascale supercomputer, it can perform up to 1.1 exaFLOPS, which is equal to 1.1 quintillion (10^18, or 1,100,000,000,000,000,000) floating-point operations per second. It's made from 9,472 AMD central processing units (CPUs) and 37,888 AMD graphics processing units (GPUs). (That's a staggering amount of both CPUs and GPUs). Frontier was the fastest supercomputer in the world until another supercomputer, named El Capitan and located at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, overtook it with 1.742 exaFLOPS in November 2024, according to the AMD website.