The 55th edition of the TOP500 saw some significant additions to the list, spearheaded by a new number one system from Japan. The latest rankings also reflect a steady growth in aggregate performance and power efficiency.
The new top system, Fugaku, turned in a High Performance Linpack (HPL) result of 415.5 petaflops, besting the now second-place Summit system by a factor of 2.8x. Fugaku, is powered by Fujitsu’s 48-core A64FX SoC, becoming the first number one system on the list to be powered by ARM processors. In single or further reduced precision, which are often used in machine learning and AI applications, Fugaku’s peak performance is over 1,000 petaflops (1 exaflops). The new system is installed at RIKEN Center for Computational Science (R-CCS) in Kobe, Japan.
Number two on the list is Summit, an IBM-built supercomputer that delivers 148.8 petaflops on HPL. The system has 4,356 nodes, each equipped with two 22-core Power9 CPUs, and six NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs. The nodes are connected with a Mellanox dual-rail EDR InfiniBand network. Summit is running at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee and remains the fastest supercomputer in the US.
At number three is Sierra, a system at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California achieving 94.6 petaflops on HPL. Its architecture is very similar to Summit, equipped with two Power9 CPUs and four NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs in each of its 4,320 nodes. Sierra employs the same Mellanox EDR InfiniBand as the system interconnect.
Sunway TaihuLight, a system developed by China’s National Research Center of Parallel Computer Engineering & Technology (NRCPC) drops to number four on the list. The system is powered entirely by Sunway 260-core SW26010 processors. Its HPL mark of 93 petaflops has remained unchanged since it was installed at the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi, China in June 2016.
At number five is Tianhe-2A (Milky Way-2A), a system developed by China’s National University of Defense Technology (NUDT). Its HPL performance of 61.4 petaflops is the result of a hybrid architecture employing Intel Xeon CPUs and custom-built Matrix-2000 coprocessors. It is deployed at the National Supercomputer Center in Guangzhou, China.
A new system on the list, HPC5, captured the number six spot, turning in an HPL performance of 35.5 petaflops. HPC5 is a PowerEdge system built by Dell and installed by the Italian energy firm Eni S.p.A, making it the fastest supercomputer in Europe. It is powered by Intel Xeon Gold processors and NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs and uses Mellanox HDR InfiniBand as the system network.
Another new system, Selene, is in the number seven spot with an HPL mark of 27.58 petaflops. It is a DGX SuperPOD, powered by NVIDIA’s new “Ampere” A100 GPUs and AMD’s EPYC “Rome” CPUs. Selene is installed at NVIDIA in the US. It too uses Mellanox HDR InfiniBand as the system network.
Frontera, a Dell C6420 system installed at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) in the US is ranked eighth on the list. Its 23.5 HPL petaflops is achieved with 448,448 Intel Xeon cores.
The second Italian system in the top 10 is Marconi-100, which is installed at the CINECA research center. It is powered by IBM Power9 processors and NVIDIA V100 GPUs, employing dual-rail Mellanox EDR InfiniBand as the system network. Marconi-100’s 21.6 petaflops earned it the number nine spot on the list.
Rounding out the top 10 is Piz Daint at 21.2 petaflops, a Cray XC50 system installed at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) in Lugano, Switzerland. It is equipped with Intel Xeon processors and NVIDIA P100 GPUs.
For more information about the sites and systems in the list, click on the links or view the complete list.