A supercomputer in the US called'Frontier' has become the fastest in the world, beating its closest rival in Japan. Frontier, based at the US Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, is the first to achieve a level of computing known as'exascale'. Exascale refers to a system that can perform at least one quintillion operations per second – a billion billion calculations, or 1 followed by 18 zeroes. This makes Frontier more than twice as powerful than the Fugaku supercomputer in Japan, which was deemed the world's fastest supercomputer back in June 2020. Frontier will allow scientists to develop technologies for the US's energy, economic and national security, said Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and solve computational problems that were impossible to do just five years ago.

Instead, it was born with an "application-first philosophy," meaning that its exclusive purpose is to dedicate its computational excellence to tackling some of the world's biggest challenges, such as climate change, says Satoshi Matsuoka, 57, the mastermind behind the project. "Benchmark excellence is not our priority," he said in an interview conducted in fluent, near flawless English. Instead, he said, its success is assessed "based on how much we can accelerate the applications that are important in society." As the director of Riken's Center for Computational Science, Matsuoka and his team have set out nine application areas for Fugaku to work on that are of importance to society, such as medicine, pharmacology, disaster prediction and prevention, environmental sustainability and energy. Matsuoka began leading the team developing the next-generation supercomputer in around 2010, just before its predecessor K computer became the world's fastest supercomputer in the Top500 benchmark by conducting more than 10 quadrillion calculations per second.