The United States Oakridge National Lab Frontier Supercomputer is the first exaflop supercomputer.
The Frontier system is the first true exascale machine with an HPL score of 1.102 Exaflop/s.
The No. 1 spot is now held by the Frontier system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in the US. Based on the latest HPE Cray EX235a architecture and equipped with AMD EPYC 64C 2GHz processors, the system has 8,730,112 total cores, a power efficiency rating of 52.23 gigaflops/watt, and relies on gigabit ethernet for data transfer.
The top position was previously held for two years straight by the Fugaku system at the RIKEN Center for Computational Science (R-CCS) in Kobe, Japan. Sticking with its previous HPL benchmark score of 442 PFlop/s, Fugaku has now dropped to No. 2. Considering the fact that Fugaku’s theoretical peak is above the 1 exaflop barrier, there’s cause to also call this system an exascale machine as well. However, Frontier is the only system able to demonstrate this on the HPL benchmark test.
China was previously leading in supercomputer development but they have not introduced new higher power systems since they were banned from using the best US chips. Intel chips are not used for the fastest supercomputers. AMD, Cray and Nvidia are the main providers of chips for the top supercomputers.
Another change within the TOP10 is the introduction of the LUMI system at EUROHPC/CSC in Finland. Now occupying the No. 3 spot, this new system has 1,110,144 cores and has a HPL benchmark of nearly 152 PFlop/s. LUMI is also noteworthy in that it is the largest system in Europe.
Summit, an IBM-built system at ORNL in Tennessee, USA, is now listed at the No. 4 spot worldwide with a performance of 148.8 Pflop/s on the HPL benchmark which is used to rank the TOP500 list. Summit has 4,356 nodes, each housing two Power9 CPUs with 22 cores and six NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs, each with 80 streaming multiprocessors (SM). The nodes are linked together with a Mellanox dual-rail EDR InfiniBand network.
Sierra, a system at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, CA, USA, is at No. 5. Its architecture is very similar to the #4 systems Summit. It is built with 4,320 nodes with two Power9 CPUs and four NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs. Sierra achieved 94.6 Pflop/s.
Sunway TaihuLight is a system developed by China’s National Research Center of Parallel Computer Engineering & Technology (NRCPC) and installed at the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi, China’s Jiangsu province, is listed at the No. 6 position with 93 Pflop/s.
Perlmutter at No. 7 is based on the HPE Cray “Shasta” platform, and a heterogeneous system with AMD EPYC based nodes and 1536 NVIDIA A100 accelerated nodes. Perlmutter achieved 64.6 Pflop/s.
At No. 8, Selene is an NVIDIA DGX A100 SuperPOD installed inhouse at NVIDIA in the USA. The system is based on an AMD EPYC processor with NVIDIA A100 for acceleration and a Mellanox HDR InfiniBand as network and achieved 63.4 Pflop/s.
Tianhe-2A (Milky Way-2A), a system developed by China’s National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) and deployed at the National Supercomputer Center in Guangzhou, China is now listed as the No. 9 system with 61.4 Pflop/s.
The Adastra system installed at GENCI-CINES is new to the list at No. 10. It is the third new HPE Cray EX system and the second fastest system in Europe. It achieved 46.1 Pflop/s.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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