Welcome to exascale computing
Ariana Remmel · C&EN Global Enterprise · 2022
Computational chemists are getting ready to run experiments on the fastest supercomputers ever built. This year, Oak Ridge National Laboratory debuted a supercomputer called Frontier that is the first to officially calculate more than a million trillion floating-point operations per second, breaking what is known as the exascale computing barrier. The outsize computing power of Frontier and other exascale machines soon to become available could help chemists simulate molecular models with more atoms, with greater complexity, and on longer timescales than ever before. This capability will push scientists to provide more experimental data to validate the computer’s findings, which could reshape our understanding of chemical theory. Surrounded by lush forests, Oak Ridge National Laboratory sits in a secluded mountain valley in eastern Tennessee. Visitors often travel to the federal research complex to tour historic sites where scientists made some of the first forays into nuclear physics and fission reactions in