The Manhattan Project in Oak Ridge, Tennessee

2min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

"It was incredible. We had spent all day looking at what's next in the future and all of a sudden we walked back into the past," says Bill Cabbage, public information officer at Oak Ridge. "This was an incredible complex with a bunch of buildings we didn't even have a chance to go to," adds Steve Hamilton, who works on high-performance computing for nuclear applications.

Last May, the Oak Ridge National Lab, run by the US Department of Energy, unveiled Frontier–the world's fastest supercomputer. It’s capable of performing a quintillion calculations per second, breaking what's called the exascale barrier.

The system requires its own power plant, 6,000 gallons of water to keep it cool, and a highly trained staff to operate. So what can it do? And who gets to use it?

We set out for Knoxville, Tennessee to try to wrap our brains around Frontier’s limitless potential.

See more about Frontier here: It Takes 6,000 Gallons of Water to Cool the World’s Fastest Supercomputer

Listen to The Big Take podcast every weekday and subscribe to our daily newsletter: https://bloom.bg/3F3EJAK

Have questions or comments for Wes and the team? Reach us at bigtake@bloomberg.net.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.