Exascale 'Frontier' at ORNL @ 1.5 quintillion operations/second; production in 2022; $600M contract. Quantum supremacy just became 50% harder.

By Jeffrey Cohen, @chicago_quantum, Founder of Chicago Quantum. June 10, 2019
Seven facts about Frontier (from the sources):  
- Weighs over a million pounds
- Performance equals the world's top 160 fastest supercomputers.
- Performance of 1.5 exaflops, equals 1.5 quintillion operations per second, equals 1.5 x billion x billion operations per second.
- Partnership between Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), U.S. Department of Energy, Cray and AMD, with a Cray contract including $6oom for a CoE, early delivery systems, the main Frontier system, and multi-year system support.
- Cray Programming Environment (Cray PE) will be enhanced in 3 ways:  enhanced high-level software development environment, integrated with AMD technology with Cray Slingshot to take better advantage of the hardware, and integrated with a full machine-learning software stack.
- Establish a Center of Excellence by Cray and Oak Ridge National Lab
Frontier will be based on Cray's architecture, AMD's CPU and GPU technologies.
- Lawrence Livermore Lab will have an exascale computer too (pre-announced), and Argonne National Lab's Aurora @ 1.0 exaflops was recently announced (Intel and Cray for $500M).
Sources: 
https://www.cray.com/resources/how-frontier-measures-up
https://www.cray.com/blog/doe-and-cray-announce-exascale-supercomputer-frontier/#comment-757096
http://investors.cray.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=98390&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=2397457

​Implications:  While Energy Secretary Rick Perry discusses how we will 'win' the race to develop quantum computers, he is ensuring the U.S. has access to exascale classical computing too.