The brief

Analyst view

• Frontier (2022) was the first machine to pass one exaflop on the standard benchmark, at 1.102 exaflops.
• Discovery (HPE Cray GX5000, AMD Venice CPUs + MI430X GPUs) is due in 2028 and in service in 2029; about $500M.
• Lux, an AI cluster of about 4,000 AMD MI355X GPUs, is being installed; half its time is reserved for paying partners.

Technical approach

As reported

Buy

One flagship machine every generation

The lab's computing facility buys a new leadership supercomputer each generation and runs it as a shared tool for national science.

Prepare

Codes made ready before the hardware lands

Science teams get early access, hackathons and vendor help years ahead, so the machine does real work from its first day.

Partner

Shared AI clusters with industry

Lux is co-funded with AMD; DOE science gets half its compute time and paying public and private partners the other half, a new model for the labs.