Frontier
Oak Ridge National Laboratory runs Frontier at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility as a DOE open-science machine for reactor modelling, precision medicine, fusion, materials, cosmology and AI combined with simulation.
What it runs and how to get time
From the operator- Used for What the operator says the system is used for: science domains, missions or workloads. Taken from the operator, its funder or the system vendor, not from TOP500.
- Open science: nuclear reactor and fusion modelling, genomics and precision medicine, materials, combustion, cosmology, astrophysics, and AI combined with simulation 4
- How to get time How researchers or customers get time on the system, naming the allocation programme where the operator states one.
- DOE INCITE and ALCC annual calls plus year-round OLCF Director's Discretionary projects (about 10% of Frontier hours) 5
- Cooling Cooling design stated by the operator or supplier.
- Warm-water cooling from a new mechanical plant in Building 5800; 130,000-gallon cooling-tower loop, 30-40% more efficient than Summit 6
- Power design Facility power, energy supply or heat reuse as stated by the operator. Not the benchmark power in the Power column.
- About 30 MW at peak; site upgrade delivered about 40 MW of power and cooling, with a new 28 MW transformer room around the data hall 6
- Facility Building, data centre or campus that houses the system, as described by the operator.
- Room E102, Building 5600 (former Titan data centre), Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, Tennessee 6
- Upgrade or successor Announced upgrade, expansion, successor or retirement plan, with dates where the operator gives them.
- Successor Discovery (HPE Cray GX5000, AMD Venice CPUs, MI430X GPUs) announced Oct 2025 for delivery in 2028 8
- Production start Month the operator says the system entered production.
- 2022-05 4
- Status Operating status, filled only when the operator states it.
- In production 4
Benchmark and hardware
Source per value- Rank Position in the TOP500 edition named in the Edition column. Historic systems keep the rank of the edition where they last appeared.
- 3 1
- Rmax PFLOP/s Measured double-precision LINPACK (HPL) performance of the listed configuration. Older TFLOP/s and GFLOP/s figures are converted to PFLOP/s.
- 1,353 1
- Rpeak PFLOP/s Theoretical peak double-precision performance of the listed configuration. This is not AI or mixed-precision throughput.
- 2,055.72 1
- HPL efficiency % Rmax divided by Rpeak: the share of theoretical peak the system delivered on LINPACK. Computed from the two sourced figures.
- 65.8 1
- Power kW Power reported for the benchmark run. Measurement boundaries vary by site; this is not facility power, TDP or cooling capacity. Empty when the system does not report it.
- 24,607 1
- Efficiency GFLOP/s per W Rmax per watt of reported benchmark power, computed from the two sourced figures (GFLOP/s per W). Empty when power is not reported.
- 54.98 1
- Site Host or operator named by TOP500 for the installation.
- DOE/SC/Oak Ridge National Laboratory 1
- Country Country or region reported by TOP500 for the site.
- United States 1
- Region World region of the installation country (grouping applied by this site).
- Americas 1
- Vendor Manufacturer or system supplier exactly as submitted to TOP500.
- HPE 1
- Vendor group Supplier grouped for filtering. Bull is the Eviden/Atos line; Other covers single-system suppliers.
- HPE 1
- System model Hardware platform in the cited TOP500 edition.
- HPE Cray EX235a 1
- Processor CPU description in the cited TOP500 edition; clock and core count refer to the processor model.
- AMD Optimized 3rd Generation EPYC 64C 2GHz 1
- Accelerator Accelerator model listed for the system. Empty when TOP500 lists none.
- AMD Instinct MI250X 1
- Accelerator vendor Maker of the accelerator. None listed means TOP500 names no accelerator for the system.
- AMD 1
- Interconnect Network fabric exactly as listed in the cited TOP500 edition.
- Slingshot-11 1
- Fabric Interconnect family derived from the listed interconnect (grouping applied by this site).
- Slingshot 1
- Cores cores Total cores submitted to TOP500, including accelerator cores where TOP500 counts them. Not a CPU-only count and not a CUDA-core count.
- 9,066,176 1
- Installed Installation year reported in the TOP500 system record. Not necessarily the year of production acceptance.
- 2021 2
- Edition TOP500 edition (YYYY-MM) that supplies the ranking and benchmark data. A historic edition does not assert current operating status.
- 2026-06 1
- OS Operating system from the TOP500 system record.
- HPE Cray OS 2
- TOP500 record Link to the TOP500 database record for this exact submission.
- https://www.top500.org/system/180047/ 2
- Accelerators per node per node Accelerator packages or superchips per node, as the operator describes them.
- 4 3
- CPU memory per node GB Operator-reported CPU-accessible memory per node.
- 512 3
- Node bandwidth Gb/s Aggregate network bandwidth per compute node, as stated by the operator.
- 800 3
Sources
- TOP500 list, June 2026 accessed 2026-11-11
- TOP500 system record accessed 2026-11-11
- docs.olcf.ornl.gov (operator page) accessed 2026-11-11
- Frontier – Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility accessed 2026-11-11
- Request a New Allocation — OLCF User Documentation accessed 2026-11-11
- Building an Exascale-Class Data Center – Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility accessed 2026-11-11
- Powering Frontier – Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility accessed 2026-11-11
- ORNL, AMD, and HPE to Deliver DOE's Newest AI Supercomputers: Discovery and Lux accessed 2026-11-11
- HPE to build two systems for Oak Ridge National Laboratory: Discovery and Lux accessed 2026-11-11