The 62nd edition of the TOP500 reveals that the Frontier system retains its top spot and is still the only exascale machine on the list. However, five new or upgraded systems have shaken up the Top 10.
Housed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee, USA, Frontier leads the pack with an HPL score of 1.194 EFlop/s – unchanged from the June 2023 list. Frontier utilizes AMD EPYC 64C 2GHz processors and is based on the latest HPE Cray EX235a architecture. The system has a total of 8,699,904 combined CPU and GPU cores. Additionally, Frontier has an impressive power efficiency rating of 52.59 GFlops/watt and relies on HPE’s Slingshot 11 network for data transfer.
The new Aurora system at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility in Illinois, USA, entered the list at the No. 2 spot – previously held by Fugaku – with an HPL score of 585.34 PFlop/s. That said, it is important to note that Aurora’s numbers were submitted with a measurement on half of the planned final system. Aurora is currently being commissioned and will reportedly exceed Frontier with a peak performance of 2 EFlop/s when finished.
Aurora is built by Intel and is based on the HPE Cray EX – Intel Exascale Compute Blade, which uses Intel Xeon CPU Max Series processors and Intel Data Center GPU Max Series accelerators. These communicate through HPE’s Slingshot-11 network interconnect.
In the entire list, 20 new systems now use Intel Sapphire Rapids CPUs. Bringing the total number of systems using this CPU to 25, the Intel Sapphire Rapids CPU is now leading the new CPU among new systems. However, of the 45 new systems on the list only four use the corresponding Intel GPU, with Aurora being the largest by far.
Another new system named Eagle, installed in the Microsoft Azure Cloud in the USA, has taken the No. 3 spot. This is the highest rank a cloud system has ever achieved on the TOP500. In fact, it was only 2 years ago that a previous Azure system was the first cloud system ever to enter the TOP10 at spot No. 10. This Microsoft NDv5 system has an HPL score of 561.2 PFlop/s and is based on Intel Xeon Platinum 8480C processors and NVIDIA H100 accelerators.
Fugaku has moved to its current ranking of No. 4 after achieving No. 2 in the June 2023 list and holding the No. 1 spot from June 2020 until November 2021. This system is based in Kobe, Japan, and has an HPL score of 442.01 PFlop/s. It remains the highest ranked system outside the USA.
The LUMI system based at Euro HPC/CSC in Kajaani, Finland, achieved the No. 5 spot with an HPL score of 379.70 PFlop/s. This system is the largest in Europe and has seen multiple upgrades that keep it near the top of the list, this time improving from an HPL score of 309.10 PFlop/s. on the last list.
Rmax and Rpeak values are in PFlop/s. For more details about other fields, check the TOP500 description.
Rpeak values are calculated using the advertised clock rate of the CPU. For the efficiency of the systems you should take into account the Turbo CPU clock rate where it applies.