Top500[1] is a ranking of the most powerful supercomputers published since 1993 and updated two times a year. It compares state-of-the-art supercomputers regarding the number of floating-point operations performed per second (FLOPS, flops, or flop/s). The latest 59th edition, released on June 1, brought big news. The Frontier supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory is the first computer in the world that reached more than one exaflop and hence took the leadership position. In other words, Frontier can perform more than 10^18 operations per second. To better understand the scale of this achievement, imagine that if each person on earth completed one calculation per second, it would take more than four years to do what an exascale computer can do in just one second.

The race towards exascale computing began in June 2008, when Roadrunner became the first supercomputer ever to achieve one petaflop corresponding to one-thousandth of an exaflop. After fourteen years, we reached the next milestone that the entire HPC community eagerly waited for. By scoring 1.102 exaflops, Frontier beat the Fugaku supercomputer, which has been at the top of the ranking for the last two years with a score of 442 petaflops.