The latest list of the top 500 supercomputers has appeared, which this time does not bring any amazing changes, but also sheds light on interesting trends.
Once again the world’s 500 most powerful have been updated List your supercomputerThe main novelty this time around is the appearance of one new system in the Top10 field. According to the comments, this is in line with the trend that the performance of the devices on the list is constantly improving, but in general the pace of development is slowing down.
Perlmutter, who worked at the US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, immediately qualified for fifth with a performance of 64.6 petaflops. In addition, with a performance of 25.55 gigaflops per watt, it also ranks sixth on the Green500 list, which ranks the energy efficiency of supercomputers.
A total of 58 new systems appeared in the Top 500, the same size as the negative record set in November with 44 new participants at the time. Of course, this is not a small thing in itself, but it is surprisingly less, for example, the result of 2007, when the field of the most powerful 500 supercomputers was replaced in 300 places.
The king is not in danger
Acting List top500.org According to the commission, this is mainly due to the effects of the COVID-19 crisis, as investment in high-performance trading systems has fallen to an all-time low. The Japanese Fugaku supercomputer is sure to keep it in the leading position since its launch last March.
The Fugaku 442 features petaflops, which means it performs three times better than the second most powerful system. The latter is none other than the top that IBM built in 2018, which is also operated by the Department of Energy at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and is currently capable of peak performance of 148.8 petaflops.
As a result of the partnership between Riken and Fujitsu, Fugaku uses specially developed ARM Fujitsu processors and is being referred to as the first “exascale” supercomputer capable of breaking through the exaflop performance threshold. By the way, China, the United States and the European Union are also working on such schemes with steam power and will launch them in the next few years.
AMD gained momentum
The latest report also reveals a significant drop in the number of devices in the top 500 list in China. This time, instead of 212 in the previous version, we can find “only” 186 Chinese supercomputers, although China still dominates the vanguard in general: the subsequent United States is represented by 123 systems.
However, China’s superiority is immediately grasped when we compare the performance of supercomputers, as other systems have confidently outperformed the capabilities out there thus far. The cumulative performance of the United States alone is 856.8 petaflops per second, while Chinese supercomputers produce an average of 445.3 petaflops.
The authors highlighted a significant increase in the use of AMD processors, especially among newly added systems. The company’s EPYC processors appear in half of the 58 best new supercomputers, and also appear in three places in the top ten (including the aforementioned Perlmutter). This means that compared to the same period last year, AMD processors are running five times as many as the top 500 supercomputers.
