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

Gauss Center for Supercomputing Announces Call for Large-Scale Projects Opens July 19

July 1, 2021 — The Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS) provides computing power and services of the highest performance class for computational sciences and engineering at its three member sites in Garching (Leibniz Supercomputing Centre, LRZ), Jülich (Jülich Supercomputing Centre, JSC), and Stuttgart (High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart, HLRS). Projects are classified as “Large-Scale”, if […]

The post Gauss Center for Supercomputing Announces Call for Large-Scale Projects Opens July 19 appeared first on HPCwire.

ISC21 Keynote: Thomas Sterling on Urgent Computing, Big Machines, China Speculation

In a somewhat shortened version of his annual ISC keynote surveying the HPC landscape Thomas Sterling lauded the community’s effort in bringing HPC to bear in the fight against the pandemic, welcomed the start of the exascale – if not yet exaflops – era with quick tour of some big machines, speculated a little on […]

The post ISC21 Keynote: Thomas Sterling on Urgent Computing, Big Machines, China Speculation appeared first on HPCwire.

Exascale Computing Project and Exagraph: Applying Graph Algorithms

This podcast from the Department of Energy’s Exascale Computing Project (ECP) examines the ExaGraph Project, an ECP co-design center, tasked with developing efficient implementation of graph algorithms. Along with technical aspects of graph algorithms, the podcast looks at the significance of graph algorithms and their widespread use. Taking part in the podcast are ExaGraph Project […]

The post Exascale Computing Project and Exagraph: Applying Graph Algorithms appeared first on insideHPC.

Graphcore Right on the Money in First MLPerf Appearance

When it comes to a silicon startup bringing a product to market in a tough competitive landscape, nothing is easy. …

Graphcore Right on the Money in First MLPerf Appearance was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

insideHPC’s ISC Video Lineup: Experts Talk ISC Highlights, ‘HPC Shark Tank’ and Our Vendor Interviews

insideHPC offers a rich lineup of video events and interviews for virtual ISC 2021, including off-hours events designed to enlighten and entertain along with a host of vendor interviews with HPC companies. Today at 3:30 pm Eastern Time/midnight CET we offer an off-hours event: ISC Retrospective: HPC Experts Discuss the Highpoints of ISC 2021, a […]

The post insideHPC’s ISC Video Lineup: Experts Talk ISC Highlights, ‘HPC Shark Tank’ and Our Vendor Interviews appeared first on insideHPC.

Intel Delays “Sapphire Rapids” Server Chips, Confirms HBM Memory Option

It is a relatively quiet International Supercomputing conference on the hardware front, with no new processors or switch ASICs being announced from the usual suspects. …

Intel Delays “Sapphire Rapids” Server Chips, Confirms HBM Memory Option was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Sponsored Article

Performance Requirements and Environmental Impact are not Exclusive
June 15, 2021

Today's data centers consume between 1% and 3% of all electricity worldwide. Over 80% (Reference 1) of this electricity is currently generated by burning fossil fuels, and electricity generation is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. However, data centers continue to expand as new services are constantly being offered to consumers and organizations. Advanced computing technologies that include CPU level generational enhancements, heterogeneous computing, and faster storage and networking enable more complex analytics and simulations to be brought into mainstream workloads.

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/

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