USA · upgraded · mixed

Frontier

Deep dive: Frontier: the first exaflop and its price

Also known as OLCF-5

Operated by Oak Ridge National Laboratory at Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility .

Researched with AI assistance, checked by scripts. These rows were researched by AI agents reading public operator, laboratory and vendor sources, appended by scripts and checked by automated validation; no subject-matter expert has reviewed them (how this site is made). A mechanical second-reader pass has since fetched every cited source: 1350 of 1540 systems have a readable citation that names them, and 64 are genuinely weakly sourced. Every claim carries its source and a confidence tier. Treat anything below verified as a lead, not a citation.

Measured performance

Rmax: 1.35 EFlop/s
Rpeak: 2.06 EFlop/s
Rmax ÷ Rpeak: 65.8%
Cores: 9,066,176
Power: 24.61 MW
Per watt: 55.0 GF/W

Figures are as last publicly reported for the configuration described below, not a live measurement. Where a system was upgraded in place, the post-upgrade configuration is shown and the earlier one appears in the timeline.

What this machine is made of

One row per supplier relationship. “Supplier at build” is the company that shipped the part at the time; where that company has since been acquired, the parent it rolls up to today is shown beside it. That distinction is what makes ticker-level aggregation possible across a thirty-year dataset.

Role	Part	Supplier at build	Quantity	Confidence	Source
Integrator	- HPE Cray EX235a	Hewlett Packard Enterprise HPENYSE	-	Verified	olcf.ornl.gov hpe.com
Accelerator	AMD Instinct MI250X Accelerators ROCm (CDNA 2) · 1.7 GHz · TSMC N6 · 560 W AMD Instinct MI250X, 4 per node	AMD AMDNASDAQ	37,632 reported	Verified	olcf.ornl.gov hpe.com
CPU	AMD EPYC 7A53 (Trento) CPUs x86-64 · 64C · 2 GHz · 7 nm · 280 W AMD Optimized 3rd Generation EPYC 64C 2GHz	AMD AMDNASDAQ	9,408 reported	Reported	olcf.ornl.gov hpe.com
Interconnect	HPE Slingshot-11 Interconnect Dragonfly · 200 Gb/s per port · Around 2 microseconds Slingshot-11	Hewlett Packard Enterprise HPENYSE	-	Verified	olcf.ornl.gov hpe.com
Storage	HPE Cray ClusterStor E1000 Storage Lustre appliance, flash and disk tiers · 700 PB on Frontier (Orion) · About 10 TB/s peak Orion, Lustre on ClusterStor E1000	Hewlett Packard Enterprise HPENYSE	-	Reported	olcf.ornl.gov hpe.com
Cooling	Direct liquid cooling, warm water Cooling Direct-to-chip cold plates, facility water loop · Removes 90+ percent of node heat to liquid 100% direct liquid cooled cabinet	Hewlett Packard Enterprise HPENYSE	-	Reported	olcf.ornl.gov hpe.com
Operating system	HPE Cray Operating System Operating systems SUSE-derived Linux, container-based management · Proprietary layer over open-source Linux HPE Cray Operating System	Hewlett Packard Enterprise HPENYSE	-	Reported	olcf.ornl.gov hpe.com

AI datacenter metrics

Figures beyond an accelerator count, each with who stated it. What can and cannot be compared across AI datacenters.

Metric	Value	As of	Basis	Note	Source
Accelerators	37,632 accelerators	2024-02	Operator stated	OLCF slides: 9,408 nodes x 4 MI250X modules (product computed). Each module has 2 GCDs, so the OS sees 75,264 GPUs.	olcf.ornl.gov
Stated investment	0.6 USD bn	2019-05	Operator stated	DOE: total contract award valued at more than $600M for the system and technology development. Contract value, excludes facility upgrades.	energy.gov
Facility power	40 MW	2020-09	Design target	OLCF: about 40 MW of power and cooling provided to the Frontier data centre (new 2.5-mile line). Facility build target, not a metered draw.	olcf.ornl.gov olcf.ornl.gov
IT power	30 MW	2020-12	Design target	OLCF program director before delivery: at peak Frontier will consume about 30 MW. Design-time estimate for the system, not metered.	olcf.ornl.gov

Published benchmark results

HPL-MxP 2025-11: HPL-MxP mixed-precision (rank 3), 11.39 EFlop/s (independent, 2025-11) hpl-mxp.org top500.org
HPL-MxP 2026-06: HPL-MxP mixed-precision (rank 3), 11.4 EFlop/s (independent, 2026-06) top500.org top500.org

The read

The first system to clear an exaflop on HPL. Every part of the compute node comes from AMD (a custom Trento EPYC linked to four MI250X modules by Infinity Fabric rather than PCIe) with HPE supplying the cabinet, the Slingshot-11 fabric and the Orion storage system. Two suppliers account for essentially the entire machine. Figures shown are the post-upgrade configuration.

Timeline

2019 Announced source
2022-05 First operational source
2022-06 List debut at #1 (June 2022) source
2024-11 Reported at 1.353 EFlop/s after node and configuration changes source

Public list appearances

Pointers only: rank and edition, linking to the canonical entry. We do not reproduce list tables. See sourcing policy.

Site & facility

Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility

Location: Oak Ridge, TN, USA
Utility: Tennessee Valley Authority
Cooling: Direct liquid cooling (warm water)
Commissioned: 1993

olcf.ornl.gov ornl.gov

Change history

2026-10-04 AI benchmark record: hpl-mxp 2025-11
2026-10-04 AI benchmark record: hpl-mxp 2026-06
2026-09-22 Gained a Green500 rank pointer (#8 on the 2023-11 list)

Source check

We fetched this system's own citations and recorded whether each page actually mentions it. This is a corroboration signal, not a fact check, and it is published so you can see how well the sourcing holds up rather than take it on trust.

Cited source	Result	Found on the page
hpe.com	does not name this system	Direct liquid cooling, warm water, HPE Cray Operating System, HPE Cray ClusterStor E1000
olcf.ornl.gov	names system and part	AMD Instinct MI250X, Direct liquid cooling, warm water, AMD EPYC 7A53 (Trento), HPE Cray Operating System, HPE Cray ClusterStor E1000

Checked 2026-10-18 by pnpm verify. Re-run it and the table changes with the web.

Related news

2025-11-17 TOP500's 66th list confirms JUPITER as the first exascale system outside the US · TOP500
El Capitan holds number one at a remeasured 1.809 exaflop/s and Frontier and Aurora hold two and three, so all three US exascale systems in this dataset keep their relative order. JUPITER's 1.000 exaflop/s Booster partition becomes the fourth exascale system worldwide and the first in Europe, confirming the milestone this dataset's earlier rows on Bull's JUPITER delivery had been building toward.
2025-10-27 ORNL, AMD and HPE announce Discovery and Lux as Frontier's AI-era successors · Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility
Lux runs AMD Instinct MI355X on HPE nodes with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure integration and arrives first, in 2026; Discovery follows in 2028 on MI430X and is billed as beating Frontier on every part of the system, not just peak flops. This keeps ORNL's AMD based lineage going a full hardware generation past the MI300A in El Capitan and the MI250X in Frontier.
2022-05-30 Frontier becomes the first system measured past one exaflop · Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility
Every part of the compute node came from a single supplier, with HPE providing the cabinet, fabric and storage. Two companies account for essentially the whole machine.

All news →