UPDATED 16:07 EDT / JUNE 18 2019

INFRA

As supercomputers grow faster, Top500 hits 1.5 exaflops for the first time

The biannual Top500 list is the supercomputing industry’s reference book on the latest advances in system design. It ranks the world’s 500 fastest supercomputers every six months, providing a valuable update on how the sector evolves as new technologies and processors enter the mix.

The latest edition, which came out on Monday, marks several firsts. Among the main highlights: All 500 machines on the list now provide a petaflop or more of processing power. A petaflop equals a quadrillion floating-point operations per second, floating-point operations being a type of complex calculation involving large numbers.

Thanks to the speed improvements made in the past six months, the Top500’s combined processing power has passed 1.5 exaflops for the first time. That translates into 1.5 million trillion operations per second. Nearly a tenth of the processing power comes from just one system, the Summit supercomputer that went online last year in the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory. It sits in the No. 1 spot on the list with a 148.6-petaflop top speed.

The runner-up is the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Sierra machine with 94.6 petaflops. Both systems were built by IBM Corp. from servers running its Power 9 central processing units and Nvidia Corp.’s flagship V100 graphics card.

But while the U.S. rules the upper tier of the Top500, a different picture emerges when looking at the ranking as a whole. China is nearly twice as well-represented on the list with a total of 219 systems featured in this latest edition. The fastest of the bunch is the Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer, which ranks third behind Summit and Sierra with 93 petaflops of peak performance.

The coming years will see significant changes to the Top500. In 2021, the Department of Energy will inaugurate Frontier, a groundbreaking 1.5-exaflop supercomputer that will provide as much as processing power as all the current Top500 systems combined. It’s set to be joined by a second system that is likewise expected to break the exaflop mark.

What makes Frontier unique is that it’s being built with CPUs and graphics cards from Advanced Micro Devices Inc., a somewhat unlikely supplier. Some 96% of existing Top500 systems use CPUs  from Intel Corp., while Nvidia is the dominant graphics card provider.

AMD’s unexpected win indicates that the leaps in supercomputer power the coming years will bring could be accompanied by competitive shifts. The market is already experiencing some major changes. Last month, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. acquired storied supercomputer maker Cray Inc. for $1.3 billion in a bid to capitalize on the rise of exascale systems.

Photo: Randy Wong/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

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