The TOP500 authors encourage the HPC community to submit entries for the 55th TOP500 and Green500 lists. The June 2020 TOP500 list is released during the ISC High Performance conference, which will be held in digital form from June 22-24 due to the COVID-19 pandemic this year. The submission and publication schedule of the June list is NOT affected by this change.

BERKELEY, Calif.; FRANKFURT, Germany; and KNOXVILLE, Tenn.— The 54th edition of the TOP500 saw China and the US maintaining their dominance of the list, albeit in different categories. Meanwhile, the aggregate performance of the 500 systems, based on the High Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark, continues to rise and now sits at 1.65 exaflops. The entry level to the list has risen to 1.14 petaflops, up from 1.02 petaflops in the previous list in June 2019.

The 52nd edition of the TOP500 list saw five US Department of Energy (DOE) supercomputers in the top 10 positions, with the first two captured by Summit at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and Sierra at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL).

China is investing $145 million to become a world leader in superconductor-based computing, a technology that could make semiconductor-powered supercomputers and datacenter servers obsolete.

FRANKFURT, Germany; BERKELEY, Calif.; and KNOXVILLE, Tenn.The TOP500 celebrates its 25th anniversary with a major shakeup at the top of the list. For the first time since November 2012, the US claims the most powerful supercomputer in the world, leading a significant turnover in which four of the five top systems were either new or substantially upgraded.

At this months ISC High Performance conference, representatives from Intel, NVIDIA, Xilinx, and NEC will speak about the challenges they face as applications like machine learning and analytics are demanding greater performance at a time when CMOS technology is approaching its physical limits.

Tachyum, a Silicon Valley startup has unveiled a new processor that the company says can tackle a broad range of workloads in HPC, data analytics, artificial intelligence, and web services, while using a fraction of the power of existing chips.

A trio of UK universities will install a set of HPE Apollo 70 clusters powered by Caviums ThunderX2 ARM processors. The effort is part of a three-year project, known as Catalyst UK, which is evaluating the potential of ARM-based supercomputing.

After just three years in the field, the High Performance Gradients (HPCG) benchmark is emerging as the first viable new metric for the high performance computing crowd in decades. The latest HPCG list compiled last November shows 115 supercomputer entries spread across 16 countries.

Verne Global, a UK company offering Icelandic-based green datacenter services, has launched a bare metal HPC cloud offering. Known as hpcDIRECT, the service offer customers the ability to rent HPC hardware deployed in Verne Globals datacenter complex located in Keflavik, Iceland. The clusters are equipped with Intel Xeon Scalable processors (Skylake), along with Mellanox InfiniBand and Ethernet networks. Different storage options are available as well. The company says it can support petaflops of compute, and is suitable for typical HPC applications such as computer-aided engineering, genomic sequencing, molecular modeling, and machine learning.