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

AWS Announces General Availability of Amazon EC2 DL1 Instances Powered by Habana Labs

SEATTLE, Oct. 26, 2021– Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company, announced general availability of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) DL1 instances, a new instance type designed for training machine learning models. DL1 instances are powered by Gaudi accelerators from Habana Labs (an Intel company) to provide up to 40% better […]

The post AWS Announces General Availability of Amazon EC2 DL1 Instances Powered by Habana Labs appeared first on HPCwire.

AWS Announces GA of Habana Labs-powered EC2 DL1 Instances

SEATTLE– Oct. 26, 2021– AWS has announced general availability of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) DL1 instances designed for training machine learning models and powered by Gaudi accelerators from Habana Labs (an Intel company). Providing up to 40 percent better price performance for training machine learning models than the latest GPU-powered AWS EC2 instances, […]

The post AWS Announces GA of Habana Labs-powered EC2 DL1 Instances appeared first on insideHPC.

Fireside Chat with LBNL’s Advanced Quantum Testbed Director

Last week, Irfan Siddiqi led a “fireside chat” with a few media and analysts to introduce the Department of Energy’s relatively new Advanced Quantum Testbed (AQT), which is based at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. AQT is one of two DOE quantum testbeds working with commercial and academic researchers and (broadly) with the new National Quantum […]

The post Fireside Chat with LBNL’s Advanced Quantum Testbed Director appeared first on HPCwire.

Let’s Talk Exascale: Guiding the Construction of Frontier’s Mechanical Systems

In this episode of the Let's Talk Exascale podcast, David Grant, high performance computing engineer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, talks with the lab's Scott Gibson about Frontier, the nation’s first exascale supercomputer scheduled to be installed by the end of this year. Grant, who works in ORNL’s Laboratory Modernization Division is responsible for ensuring that supercomputers installed at the lab have the cooling capacity required to operate 24/7.

The post Let’s Talk Exascale: Guiding the Construction of Frontier’s Mechanical Systems appeared first on insideHPC.

China Has Already Reached Exascale–On Two Separate Systems

Native CPU and accelerator architectures that have been in play on China’s previous large systems have been stepped up to make China first to exascale on two fronts.  …

China Has Already Reached Exascale–On Two Separate Systems was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

Intel Back To Playing The Long Game, Not The Wrong Game

The supply chain is holding back the server business, and not just in the way you are thinking. …

Intel Back To Playing The Long Game, Not The Wrong Game 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