Fugaku Holds Top Spot, Exascale Remains Elusive
June 28, 2021

FRANKFURT, Germany; BERKELEY, Calif.; and KNOXVILLE, Tenn.— The 57 th edition of the TOP500 saw little change in the Top10. The only new entry in the Top10 is the Perlmutter system at NERSC at the DOE Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The machine is based on the HPE Cray "Shasta" platform and a heterogeneous system with both GPU-accelerated and CPU-only nodes. Perlmutter achieved 64.6 Pflop/s, putting the supercomputer at No. 5 in the new list.

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

Will AMD Get Back Into Arm Server Chips?

There was a bit of a kerfuffle this week when it looked like AMD was changing its position a little bit on whether or not it would get back into designing and selling server chips based on the Arm architecture. …

Will AMD Get Back Into Arm Server Chips? was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

In Memoriam: David Skinner

Sept. 17, 2021 — David Skinner, a gifted and highly regarded member of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) and the high performance computing community for more than 20 years, passed away unexpectedly in late August. David came to Berkeley Lab and NERSC in 1999 as an HPC engineer after earning a Ph.D. […]

The post In Memoriam: David Skinner appeared first on HPCwire.

Why HPC Storage Matters More Now Than Ever: Analyst Q&A

With soaring data volumes and insatiable computing driving nearly every facet of economic, social and scientific progress, data storage is seizing the spotlight. Hyperion Research analyst and noted storage expert Mark Nossokoff looks at key storage trends in the context of the evolving HPC (and AI) landscape in this in-depth Q&A. One of the themes […]

The post Why HPC Storage Matters More Now Than Ever: Analyst Q&A appeared first on HPCwire.

Riken Claims Quantum Breakthrough: Entanglement of Three Spin Qubits

Researchers at Japan’s RIKEN scientific research institute have claimed a breakthrough in quantum computing, increasing the number of silicon-based qubits that can be entangled to three from two, which they say improves the potential of spin qubits for realizing multi-qubit quantum algorithms and effectively addressing quantum error correction. Reporting recently in SciTechDaily, the five researchers […]

The post Riken Claims Quantum Breakthrough: Entanglement of Three Spin Qubits appeared first on insideHPC.

Cerebras Alliance Offers CS-2 AI Supercomputer as Cloud Service

High performance AI chip maker Cerebras, maker of the Wafer-Scale Engine, the world’s largest computer chip, today announced Cerebras Cloud @ Cirrascale, delivering its AI accelerator as a cloud service. The alliance combines Cerebras’s CS-2 HPC/AI system, featuring 850,000 AI-optimized compute cores, with Cirrascale’s deep learning cloud services infrastructure. “With Cerebras Cloud @ Cirrascale, (the […]

The post Cerebras Alliance Offers CS-2 AI Supercomputer as Cloud Service appeared first on insideHPC.

The Tipping Point For PCI-Express Fabrics

In the longest of runs, say within the next five to ten years, in the large datacenters of the world, the server chassis as we know it will no longer exist. …

The Tipping Point For PCI-Express Fabrics was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

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

06/2021 Highlights

The only new entry in the Top10 is the Perlmutter system at NERSC at the DOE Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. It is based on the HPE Cray “Shasta” platform and a heterogeneous system with both GPU-accelerated and CPU-only nodes. Perlmutter achieved 64.6 Pflop/s which put it at No. 5 in the new list.

Supercomputer Fugaku, a system based on Fujitsu’s custom ARM A64FX processor remains 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. 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 AI applications, it’s peak performance is actually above 1,000 PFlop/s (= 1 Exaflop/s) and because of this, it is often introduced as the first ‘Exascale’ supercomputer. Fugaku actually already demonstrated this new level of performance on the new HPL-AI benchmark with 2 Exaflops! https://www.r-ccs.riken.jp/en/

read more »

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 Frontera - Dell C6420, Xeon Platinum 8280 28C 2.7GHz, Mellanox InfiniBand HDR, Dell EMC