It is hosted at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) in Tennessee, United States and became operational in 2022.

Frontier is liquid-cooled by 4 350-horsepower pumps, which flow around 6,000 gallons (22,712.47 Liters) of non-pre chilled water through the system each minute, allowing 5x the density of air-cooled architectures.

[13] Frontier uses an internal 75 TB/s read / 35 TB/s write / 15 billion IOPS flash storage system, along with the 700 PB Orion site-wide Lustre filesystem.

Existing information pointed to hundreds of thousands of GPUs being necessary to achieve 1 exaFLOP, with a total power consumption of 150-500 MW.

[16] It clocked 1.1 exaflops Rmax in May 2022, making it the world's fastest supercomputer as measured in the June 2022 edition of the TOP500 list, replacing Fugaku.

[6] ORNL Director Thomas Zacharia declared, "Frontier is ushering in a new era of exascale computing to solve the world’s biggest scientific challenges."