Still waiting for Exascale: Japan's Fugaku outperforms all competition once again
Nov. 15, 2021

FRANKFURT, Germany; BERKELEY, Calif.; and KNOXVILLE, Tenn.— The 58th annual edition of the TOP500 saw little change in the Top10. The Microsoft Azure system called Voyager-EUS2 was the only machine to shake up the top spots, claiming No. 10. Based on an AMD EPYC processor with 48 cores and 2.45GHz working together with an NVIDIA A100 GPU and 80 GB of memory, Voyager-EUS2 also utilizes a Mellanox HDR Infiniband for data transfer. 

TOP500 News

GREEN500: Trend of steady progress with no big step toward newer technologies.
June 28, 2021

Although there was a trend of steady progress in the Green500, nothing has indicated a big step toward newer technologies.

The system to snag the No. 1 spot for the Green500 was MN-3 from Preferred Networks in Japan. Knocked from the top of the last list by NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD in the US, MN-3 is back to reclaim its crown. This system relies on the MN-Core chip, an accelerator optimized for matrix arithmetic, as well as a Xeon Platinum 8260M processor. MN-3 achieved a 29.70 gigaflops/watt power-efficiency and has a TOP500 ranking of 337.

News Feed

D-Wave to Go Public with SPAC Deal; Expects ~$1.6B Market Valuation

Quantum computing pioneer D-Wave today announced plans to go public via a SPAC (special purpose acquisition company) mechanism. D-Wave will merge with DPCM Capital in a transaction expected to produce $340 million in cash and result in a roughly $1.6 billion initial market valuation. The deal is expected to be completed in the second quarter […]

The post D-Wave to Go Public with SPAC Deal; Expects ~$1.6B Market Valuation appeared first on HPCwire.

ColdQuanta Awarded a Contract to Develop Portable Atomic Clocks for US Navy

BOULDER, Colo., Feb. 8, 2022 — ColdQuanta, a global quantum ecosystem leader, today announced it has been awarded a 5-year subcontract in response to an ONR Broad Area Announcement (BAA) to develop portable atomic clocks. ColdQuanta will serve as a subcontractor to Vescent, which secured the $15.6 million total award. Under the Compact Rubidium Optical […]

The post ColdQuanta Awarded a Contract to Develop Portable Atomic Clocks for US Navy appeared first on HPCwire.

The Future Is Still Wide Open For Arm In The Datacenter

There is no question that that the combination of Nvidia and Arm Holdings would have been a powerful one in the datacenter. …

The Future Is Still Wide Open For Arm In The Datacenter was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Lenovo’s ‘Carbon-Negative’ Strategy for Customers Drives a Sustainable Energy Future

[Sponsored Content] The climate crisis – and, specifically, how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions generated by power-hungry data centers – was a top-of-mind issue at Lenovo’s recent Winterstock virtual event. The company has a lot to say on the issue in part because its strategy for addressing power usage has already cut greenhouse gas emissions […]

The post Lenovo’s ‘Carbon-Negative’ Strategy for Customers Drives a Sustainable Energy Future appeared first on insideHPC.

What Nvidia Can’t Buy, It Can Still Get Through An Arm Partnership

While a $1.25 billion hit to the Nvidia books after the company terminated its $40 billion deal to acquire chip designer Arm Holdings from Japanese conglomerate SoftBank Group this week is a big deal, the fact that Nvidia and SoftBank were going to see a lot of regulatory scrutiny and IT market resistance is no surprise. …

What Nvidia Can’t Buy, It Can Still Get Through An Arm Partnership was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Nvidia and SoftBank: Attempted Arm Deal Is Off; Arm to Prepare IPO

SANTA CLARA, Calif., and TOKYO – Feb. 7, 2022 – NVIDIA and SoftBank Group Corp. (“SBG” or “SoftBank”) today announced the termination of the previously announced transaction whereby NVIDIA would acquire Arm Limited (“Arm”) from SBG. The parties agreed to terminate the Agreement because of significant regulatory challenges preventing the consummation of the transaction, despite […]

The post Nvidia and SoftBank: Attempted Arm Deal Is Off; Arm to Prepare IPO appeared first on insideHPC.

Sponsored Article

PRACE Software Strategy for European Exascale Systems
Sept. 1, 2021

Building on the successful implementation of the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE), the European Commission (EC) has increased its efforts to develop a world-class supercomputing ecosystem in Europe. The EC, EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (JU) and EU Member States have made significant investments in European petascale and pre-exascale infrastructure, have put exascale supercomputers on the roadmap, and are actively exploring new post-exascale architectures. The return on investment will be directly linked to the productivity of end-users in academia, in industry, and in the public sector. Key to this productivity is an ecosystem of user-oriented software: scientific applications and workflows …

The List

11/2021 Highlights

The only new entry in the Top10 at No. 10 is a Microsoft Azure system called Voyager-EUS2 installed at Microsoft in the U.S. The machine achieved 30.05 Pflop/s on the HPL benchmark. This architecture is based on an AMD EPYC processor with 48 cores and 2.45GHz working together with an NVIDIA A100 GPU with 80 G.B. memory and utilizing a Mellanox HDR Infiniband for data transfer.

The only other change to the TOP10 was that the No. 5 system Perlmutter system at NERSC at the DOE Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory improved its performance to 70.9 Pflop/s which, however, did not change its position on the list. 

Supercomputer Fugaku, a system based on Fujitsu’s custom ARM A64FX processor, remains at No. 1. It is installed at the RIKEN Center for Computational Science (R-CCS) in Kobe, Japan, the location of the former K-Computer. It was co-developed in close partnership by Riken and Fujitsu and uses Fujitsu’s Tofu D interconnect to transfer data between nodes. It improved its HPL benchmark score to 442 Pflop/s, easily exceeding the No. 2 Summit by 3x. In single or further reduced precision, which are often used in machine learning and A.I. applications, its peak performance is actually above 1,000 PFlop/s (= 1 Exaflop/s). Because of this, it is often introduced as the first ‘Exascale’ supercomputer. Fugaku already demonstrated this new level of performance on the new HPL-AI benchmark with 2 Exaflops! https://www.r-ccs.riken.jp/en/ 

The new HPE/Cray/AMD build Frontier system, currently being installed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is widely expected to beat the Exa-scale barrier in full 64-bit floating point precision. However, it was not able to submit such a result before the deadline for this edition of the TOP500. Over the last year there were also reports about several Chinese systems reaching Exaflop level performance, however none of these systems submitted an HPL result to the TOP500.

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List Statistics

1 Supercomputer Fugaku - Supercomputer Fugaku, A64FX 48C 2.2GHz, Tofu interconnect D, Fujitsu
2 Summit - IBM Power System AC922, IBM POWER9 22C 3.07GHz, NVIDIA Volta GV100, Dual-rail Mellanox EDR Infiniband, IBM
3 Sierra - IBM Power System AC922, IBM POWER9 22C 3.1GHz, NVIDIA Volta GV100, Dual-rail Mellanox EDR Infiniband, IBM / NVIDIA / Mellanox
4 Sunway TaihuLight - Sunway MPP, Sunway SW26010 260C 1.45GHz, Sunway, NRCPC
5 Perlmutter - HPE Cray EX235n, AMD EPYC 7763 64C 2.45GHz, NVIDIA A100 SXM4 40 GB, Slingshot-10, HPE
6 Selene - NVIDIA DGX A100, AMD EPYC 7742 64C 2.25GHz, NVIDIA A100, Mellanox HDR Infiniband, Nvidia
7 Tianhe-2A - TH-IVB-FEP Cluster, Intel Xeon E5-2692v2 12C 2.2GHz, TH Express-2, Matrix-2000, NUDT
8 JUWELS Booster Module - Bull Sequana XH2000 , AMD EPYC 7402 24C 2.8GHz, NVIDIA A100, Mellanox HDR InfiniBand/ParTec ParaStation ClusterSuite, Atos
9 HPC5 - PowerEdge C4140, Xeon Gold 6252 24C 2.1GHz, NVIDIA Tesla V100, Mellanox HDR Infiniband, DELL EMC
10 Voyager-EUS2 - ND96amsr_A100_v4, AMD EPYC 7V12 48C 2.45GHz, NVIDIA A100 80GB​, Mellanox HDR Infiniband, Microsoft Azure