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The Frontier supercomputer at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory earned the top ranking on May 30 2022, as the world's fastest on the 59th TOP500 list, with 1.1 exaflops of performance. The system is the first to achieve the level of computing performance known as exascale, a threshold of a quintillion calculations per second. Credit: Oak Ridge National Laboratory/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

"Exascale" sounds like a science-fiction term, but it has a simple and very nonfictional definition: while a human brain can perform about one simple mathematical operation per second, an exascale computer can do at least one quintillion calculations in the time it takes to say, "One Mississippi."

In 2022 the world's first declared exascale computer, Frontier, came online at Oak Ridge National Laboratory--and it's 2.5 times faster than the second-fastest-ranked computer in the world. It will soon have better competition (or peers), though, from incoming examachines such as El Capitan, housed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and Aurora, which will reside at Argonne National Laboratory.

It's no coincidence that all of these machines find themselves at facilities whose names end with the words "national laboratory." The new computers are projects of the Department of Energy and its National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). The DOE oversees these labs and a network of others across the country. NNSA is tasked with keeping watch over the nuclear weapons stockpile, and some of exascale computing's raison d'être is to run calculations that help maintain that arsenal. But the supercomputers also exist to solve intractable problems in pure science.

When scientists are finished commissioning Frontier, which will be dedicated to such fundamental research, they hope to illuminate core truths in various fields--such as learning about how energy is produced, how elements are made and how the dark parts of the universe spur its evolution--all through almost-true-to-life simulations in ways that wouldn't have been possible even with the nothing-to-sniff-at supercomputers of a few years ago.

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