The list of the 500 most powerful systems has been updated, and an exascale machine has topped it for the first time.
He leads an Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) system called Frontier Top500 The fifty-ninth edition of the World Supercomputer List. All this also means that the top of the most powerful supercomputers can now only have a system that can exceed the limit of exaplops.
Announced the “first true exascale machine,” the system is based on the HPE Cray EX235a architecture and packed with 2GHz AMD EPYC 64C processors. Literally, as Frontier contains more than 8 million 730 thousand seeds. They need to work together to get a High Performance Linpack (HPL) score that exceeds one of the exaflops points. The supercomputer is currently being installed and tested at ORNL, where it will be operated by the Department of Energy.
stripped off
With this, the US, which has traditionally been the heaviest weight on the top 500 lists, reclaimed the fantasy crown as well. Japan-based Fugaku, who has sat comfortably on the throne for the past two years, is forced to take second place with a “modest” 442 petaflops of HPL. While the compilers acknowledge that Fugaku’s theoretical peak reaches exaflops, Frontier is the first system to prove this in a standard HPL test.
There is usually relatively little movement in the 500 supercomputer’s high-end list, which is updated twice a year, but the current version is proving to be special in that respect as well. Third place went to a new European system, Lumi, installed in Finland, with a computing power of approximately 152 petaflops.
The top three are complemented by the Finnish Rising Lumi System – another HPE Cray EX system and the largest in Europe – providing 151.9 Pflops using just over 1,110,100 cores. The latter is also based on the HPE Cray EX.
concentrated power
As for the rivalry between countries: next to most players on the field, the Chinese flag is flown (173 systems), while the second largest is the United States with 126 deployments. This also means that nearly two-thirds of the world’s most powerful supercomputers operate in these two countries.