Biography | Justin Hotard — The First Exascale Machine His Group Delivered at Oak Ridge

People treat Nokia as the whole of Justin Hotard's public life.

The machine that made his name in computing stands in this laboratory.

Frontier is the HPE Cray EX system installed at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility on the Oak Ridge Reservation in Tennessee.

In May 2022 it recorded 1.102 exaflops on the High-Performance Linpack benchmark used by the TOP500 list.

That figure made it the first machine to break the exascale line of a quintillion floating-point operations per second.

The cabinets fill computer rooms in the laboratory's 5600–5800 complex.

Seventy-four HPE Cray EX cabinets hold more than 9,400 nodes built around AMD EPYC CPUs and Instinct GPUs.

HPE announced the result from Houston on 30 May 2022.

Justin Hotard was then executive vice president and general manager of High-Performance Computing, AI and Labs at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, a post he had held since March 2021.

Nokia's later official biography states that in that role he delivered the first exascale supercomputer for the U.S. Department of Energy.

The dedication ceremony on 17 August 2022 brought Energy Department officials, Oak Ridge director Thomas Zacharia, HPE chief executive Antonio Neri, and AMD chief executive Lisa Su to sign the cabinets.

Hotard is not listed among the people who signed that day.

The work his group was paid to finish is the machine itself.

A visitor who books an Oak Ridge tour now looks at Frontier from the overlook across from room C101 in Building 5600.

Photography is allowed from that gallery.

The pin is the laboratory campus, not a private office.

Photo: OLCF at ORNL, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons