Aurora, the exascale supercomputer at Argonne National Laboratory, is now available to researchers worldwide, as announced by the system’s operators from the U.S. Department of Energy on January 28, 2025. One of the goals for Aurora is to train large language models for science.

According to official reports, among the world’s fastest supercomputers, there are currently only three systems that reach at least one exaflop. An exaflop is a quintillion (10¹⁸) calculations per second—that’s like a regular calculator computing continuously for 31 billion years, but completing everything in just a single second. Or, to put it briefly: exaflop supercomputers are incredibly fast.

The fastest among the swift three is El Capitan at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory with 1.742 exaflops per second under the HPL benchmark (High-Performance Linpack, a standardized test for measuring the computing power of supercomputers). It is followed by Frontier with 1.353 exaflops/s at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The trio is completed by Aurora with 1.012 exaflops/s. Incidentally, all three laboratories belong to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).