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

Faster Optical Switch that Operates at ‘Room Temp’ Developed by IBM, Skolkovo Researchers

Optical switching technology holds great promise for many applications but hot operating temperatures have been a key obstacle slowing progress. Now, a new optical switching device that can operate at room temperatures and achieve one trillion operations per second has been developed by researchers from IBM and the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology. Writing […]

The post Faster Optical Switch that Operates at ‘Room Temp’ Developed by IBM, Skolkovo Researchers appeared first on HPCwire.

Exxact Partners with SoftIron on Ceph-based Software Defined Storage

FREMONT, CA, October 19, 2021 — Exxact Corporation, provider of high-performance computing (HPC), artificial intelligence (AI) and data center solutions, and SoftIron, provider of task-specific data infrastructure solutions, today announced a partnership to create solutions for the enterprise designed to make software-defined storage (SDS) simple. Data center infrastructure is rapidly evolving to meet the needs […]

The post Exxact Partners with SoftIron on Ceph-based Software Defined Storage appeared first on insideHPC.

Exxact Partners with SoftIron to Provide Ceph-Based Software Defined Storage Solutions

FREMONT, Calif., Oct. 19, 2021 — Exxact Corporation; a leading provider of high performance computing (HPC), artificial intelligence (AI), and data center solutions; and SoftIron, the world-leader in task-specific data infrastructure solutions; today announced their partnership to create solutions for the modern-day enterprise that make software-defined storage (SDS) simple. Data center infrastructure is rapidly evolving […]

The post Exxact Partners with SoftIron to Provide Ceph-Based Software Defined Storage Solutions appeared first on HPCwire.

PRACE Invites Participation in HPC for Industry Survey

Oct. 19, 2021 — PRACE, the  Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe, has issued a survey aimed at assessing difficulties and issues SMEs face when attempting to apply high performance computing (HPC) and big data analysis to their work and when navigating the maze of software covering industry areas and research related to them. The survey […]

The post PRACE Invites Participation in HPC for Industry Survey appeared first on insideHPC.

Alibaba Rumored To Enter The Arm Server Chip Race

The chip cold war between China and the United States continues to heat up like a processor with a heat sink that it is a little too small. …

Alibaba Rumored To Enter The Arm Server Chip Race was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Why JAX Could Be the Next Platform for HPC-AI

So many of Google’s technology developments have had major impacts in the commercial world but the company’s impact on scientific computing has been far less pronounced. …

Why JAX Could Be the Next Platform for HPC-AI was written by Nicole Hemsoth 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