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

Irish Agency Hosts Leading European Quantum Technologies Event

Nov. 26, 2021 — The Irish Centre for High-End Computing (ICHEC) announced today (Friday, 26 November) details of the 2nd European Quantum Technologies Conference (EQTC) which is taking place from Monday, 29 November until 2nd December. Ireland, through ICHEC, won the rights to host the event in 2019 however due to Covid-19 the event originally scheduled […]

The post Irish Agency Hosts Leading European Quantum Technologies Event appeared first on HPCwire.

Samsung Electronics Announces New Advanced Semiconductor Fab Site in Taylor, Texas

Nov. 26, 2021 — Samsung Electronics, a world leader in advanced semiconductor technology, announced on Wednesday that it would build a new semiconductor manufacturing facility in Taylor, Texas. The estimated $17 billion investment in the United States will help boost production of advanced logic semiconductor solutions that power next-generation innovations and technologies. The new facility […]

The post Samsung Electronics Announces New Advanced Semiconductor Fab Site in Taylor, Texas appeared first on HPCwire.

Should Nutanix And Citrix Systems Merge To Make A Better Platform?

When we analyzed the financial reports coming out of hyperconverged platform maker Nutanix thirteen weeks ago, we lamented the fact that while Nutanix defined a new market and is one of the leaders in that market, it has been unable to expand its market fast enough to become a profitable company even after being in the field for more than a decade. …

Should Nutanix And Citrix Systems Merge To Make A Better Platform? was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Creating A Transit System For The Multicloud World

The enterprise rush to embrace multicloud and hybrid cloud has not slowed over the past several years and, indeed, has only accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic as organizations rushed to leverage cloud services to adapt to their suddenly highly distributed IT environments, with most of their employees working remotely. …

Creating A Transit System For The Multicloud World was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

DOE: Applications Open for $70M for Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC)

Nov. 23, 2021 — Today, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced plans to provide $70 million for research in earth system model development, which will contribute to further development of the Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM) through collaborations  that will use DOE high performance computers (HPC) to enable advanced modeling via mathematical and computational solutions. […]

The post DOE: Applications Open for $70M for Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) appeared first on insideHPC.

DOE Office of Science — Call for Position Papers: ASCR Workshop on Visualization for Science , Dec. 10 Due Date

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science has issued a call for position papers for its ASCR Workshop on Visualization for Sciene: Due Date: 11:59 pm ET on December 10, 2021 Notification of Selection: December 20, 2021 Workshop Date: January 18-20, 2022 WORKSHOP URL: https://www.orau.gov/ASCR_DataVisWS Goal To better understand the open challenges and opportunities and to identify […]

The post DOE Office of Science — Call for Position Papers: ASCR Workshop on Visualization for Science , Dec. 10 Due Date 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