To answer some of the most pressing questions we have—will Earth heat up by one degree Celsius in the next 50 years, or a catastrophic six?—we need supercomputers that work faster and in much greater detail than typical computers. Developed for ORNL by Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Frontier is the world’s first exascale computer, which can calculate more than one quintillion floating point operations, or FLOPs, per second— faster than the seven next most powerful supercomputers combined. It’s already being used by researchers for everything from studying black holes to climate modeling. “People compare it to the equivalent of landing on the moon in our generation, in terms of an engineering feat,” said Nic Dubé, who led the project for HPE. “This is more than a miracle. This is statistical impossibility.”
- Taylor Swift Is TIME's 2023 Person of the Year
- Meet the Nation Builders
- Why Cell Phone Reception Is Getting Worse
- Column: It's Time to Scrap the Abraham Accords
- Israeli Family Celebrates Release of Hostage Grandmother
- In a New Movie, Beyoncé Finds Freedom
- The Top 100 Photos of 2023
- Want Weekly Recs on What to Watch, Read, and More? Sign Up for Worth Your Time