US DOE wants to make Discovery: world's fastest supercomputer, 3-5x faster than Frontier

The US Department of Energy (DoE) is working on its next-generation Discovery supercomputer, which will be a whopping 3-5x faster than its existing Frontier supercomputer.

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The DoE has put out requests for proposals for its new Discovery supercomputer, with interested parties having until August 30, 2024 to submit their proposals. The next-generation Discovery supercomputer would be delivered to the Oak Ridge Leadership Facility (OLCF) at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee, by early 2028.

Discovery will succeed the Frontier supercomputer, which is the world's fastest supercomputer on the biannual Top500 list, which lists the world's fastest supercomputers -- of which Frontier is #1 -- for the fifth consecutive time in May 2024.

Frontier is built on the HPE Cray EX architecture, powered by AMD EPYC 64-core processors with a total of 8,699,904 combined GPU and CPU cores, it uses HPE's Slingshot 11 network for data transfer.

• Read more: Frontier supercomputer with 3000 x AMD Instinct MI250X cards: 1 trillion parameter LLM run
• Read more: AMD CPUs and GPUs power Frontier, the world's fastest supercomputer

The US DoE's next-generation Discovery supercomputer will be used to advance scientific research in areas like predicting climate change, drug discovery and treatments for cancer, deciphering high-energy physics data, and developing green energy solutions.

Georgia Tourassi, ORNL associate laboratory director of computing and computational sciences, said: "Discovery will enable the scientific community to model real-world situations at new levels of detail. It will help us study challenging problems we can't easily explore with experiment, observation, or theory alone".

ORNL's Matt Sieger, the OLCF's project director for Discovery said: "This project is exciting because we will be building something even more capable than Frontier, with technologies that will push the edge of what's possible".