Frontier TDS

Deep dive: Frontier: the first exaflop and its price

Also known as Frontier Test and Development System

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

Phase 1 seed dataset, compiled by hand. These rows were built from public operator, laboratory and vendor sources. A mechanical second-reader pass has since fetched every cited source: 1092 of 1153 systems have a readable citation that names them, and 40 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: 19.20 PFlop/s
Rpeak: 23.11 PFlop/s
Rmax ÷ Rpeak: 83.1%
Cores: 120,832
Power: 308.68 kW
Per watt: 62.2 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	-	Reported	top500.org top500.org
Accelerator	AMD Instinct MI250X Accelerators ROCm (CDNA 2) · 1.7 GHz · TSMC N6 · 560 W AMD Instinct MI250X	AMD AMDNASDAQ	-	Reported	top500.org
CPU	AMD EPYC 7A53 (Trento) CPUs x86-64 · 64C · 2 GHz · 7 nm · 280 W AMD Optimized 3rd Generation EPYC 64C 2GHz	AMD AMDNASDAQ	-	Reported	top500.org
Interconnect	HPE Slingshot-11 Interconnect Dragonfly · 200 Gb/s per port · Around 2 microseconds Slingshot-11	Hewlett Packard Enterprise HPENYSE	-	Reported	top500.org
Operating system	HPE Cray Operating System Operating systems SUSE-derived Linux, container-based management · Proprietary layer over open-source Linux HPE Cray OS	Hewlett Packard Enterprise HPENYSE	-	Reported	top500.org

The read

The test and development system for ORNL's Frontier exascale machine, described by TOP500 as one rack identical to the racks in Frontier itself. It took first place on the June 2022 Green500 at 62.68 GFlops/Watt, ahead of full Frontier, and stayed in the top seven for five consecutive editions through June 2024. TOP500 lists an HPE Cray EX235a with AMD Optimized 3rd Generation EPYC 64C and AMD Instinct MI250X on Slingshot-11, 120,832 cores, 19.20 PFlop/s Rmax and 308.68 kW, ranked 29th in June 2022. Both cited sources are TOP500 pages, so the tier stays reported.

Timeline

2021 First operational source
2022-06 List debut at #1 (June 2022) 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

2026-10-02 Added Frontier TDS, ORNL's one-rack test system, No. 1 on the June 2022 Green500

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
top500.org	names system and part	AMD EPYC 7A53 (Trento), AMD Instinct MI250X, HPE Slingshot-11, HPE Cray Operating System
top500.org	names system and part	AMD EPYC 7A53 (Trento), AMD Instinct MI250X, HPE Slingshot-11, HPE Cray Operating System

Checked 2026-10-09 by pnpm verify. Re-run it and the table changes with the web.