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In a surprise upset of 21st century technology norms, Oak Ridge National Laboratory has made a computer that is, in fact, very large. The Frontier supercomputer is too big to fit in a pocket or a backpack, like today’s most popular computers, and it is also too big to fit in a mid-tower PC case, which can comfortably hold an RTX 3090. How much bigger could a computer really need to be? 

Much bigger, insists Oak Ridge National Laboratory. ORNL’s Frontier (opens in new tab) has been heralded as the “first true exascale machine,” setting a record for performance of 1.02 exaflops per second on a high-performance benchmark. An exaflop is one quintillion floating point operations per second, and if you’re not sure how big a quintillion is, it’s a million million millions, aka a billion billions. NASA estimates that the Milky Way is one quintillion kilometers across.

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