The zettascale era is officially on the map, as Japan has announced plans to develop a successor to its renowned Fugaku supercomputer. The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) has set its sights on creating a machine capable of unprecedented processing power, aiming for 50 ExaFLOPS of peak AI performance with zettascale capabilities. The ambitious "Fugaku Next" project, slated to begin development next year, will be headed by RIKEN, one of Japan's leading research institutions, in collaboration with tech giant Fujitsu. With a target completion date of 2030, the new supercomputer aims to surpass current technological boundaries, potentially becoming the world's fastest once again. MEXT's vision for the "Fugaku Next" includes groundbreaking specifications for each computational node.

The ministry anticipates peak performance of several hundred FP64 TFLOPS for double-precision computations, around 50 FP16 PFLOPS for AI-oriented half-precision calculations, and approximately 100 PFLOPS for AI-oriented 8-bit precision calculations. These figures represent a major leap from Fugaku's current capabilities. The project's initial funding is set at ¥4.2 billion ($29.06 million) for the first year, with total government investment expected to exceed ¥110 billion ($761 million). While the specific architecture remains undecided, MEXT suggests the use of CPUs with special-purpose accelerators or a CPU-GPU combination. The semiconductor node of choice will likely be a 1 nm node or even more advanced nodes available at the time, with advanced packaging also used. The supercomputer will also feature an advanced storage system to handle traditional HPC and AI workloads efficiently. We already have an insight into Monaka, Fujitsu's upcoming CPU design with 150 Armv9 cores. However, Fugaku Next will be powered by the Monaka Next design, which will likely be much more capable.

Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company (NASDAQ: AMZN), and NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) today announced an expansion of their strategic collaboration to deliver the most-advanced infrastructure, software and services to power customers' generative artificial intelligence (AI) innovations. The companies will bring together the best of NVIDIA and AWS technologies—from NVIDIA's newest multi-node systems featuring next-generation GPUs, CPUs and AI software, to AWS Nitro System advanced virtualization and security, Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) interconnect, and UltraCluster scalability—that are ideal for training foundation models and building generative AI applications.

The expanded collaboration builds on a longstanding relationship that has fueled the generative AI era by offering early machine learning (ML) pioneers the compute performance required to advance the state-of-the-art in these technologies.

The Exascale supercomputer arms race is making everyone invest their resources into trying to achieve the number one spot. Some countries, like China, actively participate in the race with little proof of their work, leaving the high-performance computing (HPC) community wondering about Chinese efforts on exascale systems. Today, we have some information regarding the next-generation Sunway system, which is supposed to be China's first exascale supercomputer. Replacing the Sunway TaihuLight, the next-generation Sunway will reportedly boast over 40 million cores in its system. The information comes from an upcoming presentation for Supercomputing 2023 show in Denver, happening from November 12 to November 17.

The presentation talks about 5 ExaFLOPS in the HPL-MxP benchmark with linear scalability on the 40-million-core Sunway supercomputer. The HPL-MxP benchmark is a mixed precision HPC benchmark made to test the system's capability in regular HPC workloads that require 64-bit precision and AI workloads that require 32-bit precision. Supposedly, the next-generation Sunway system can output 5 ExaFLOPS with linear scaling on its 40-million-core system. What are those cores? We are not sure. The last-generation Sunway TaihuLight used SW26010 manycore 64-bit RISC processors based on the Sunway architecture, each with 260 cores. There were 40,960 SW26010 CPUs in the system for a total of 10,649,600 cores, which means that the next-generation Sunway system is more than four times more powerful from a core-count perspective. We expect some uArch and semiconductor node improvements as well.

When Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) announced the creation of a two-ExaFLOP supercomputer named El Capitan, we heard that AMD would power it with its Instinct MI300 accelerator. Today, LNLL published a Tweet that states, "We've begun receiving & installing components for El Capitan, @NNSANews' first #exascale #supercomputer. While we're still a ways from deploying it for national security purposes in 2024, it's exciting to see years of work becoming reality." As published images show, HPE racks filled with AMD Instinct MI300 are showing up now at LNLL's facility, and the supercomputer is expected to go operational in 2024. This could mean that November 2023 TOP500 list update wouldn't feature El Capitan, as system enablement would be very hard to achieve in four months until then.

The El Capitan supercomputer is expected to run on AMD Instinct MI300A accelerator, which features 24 Zen4 cores, CDNA3 architecture, and 128 GB of HBM3 memory. All paired together in a four-accelerator configuration goes inside each node from HPE, also getting water cooling treatment. While we don't have many further details on the memory and storage of El Capitan, we know that the system will exceed two ExFLOPS at peak and will consume close to 40 MW of power.

Cerebras Systems, the pioneer in accelerating artificial intelligence (AI) compute, today unveiled Andromeda, a 13.5 million core AI supercomputer, now available and being used for commercial and academic work. Built with a cluster of 16 Cerebras CS-2 systems and leveraging Cerebras MemoryX and SwarmX technologies, Andromeda delivers more than 1 Exaflop of AI compute and 120 Petaflops of dense compute at 16-bit half precision. It is the only AI supercomputer to ever demonstrate near-perfect linear scaling on large language model workloads relying on simple data parallelism alone.

With more than 13.5 million AI-optimized compute cores and fed by 18,176 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors, Andromeda features more cores than 1,953 Nvidia A100 GPUs and 1.6 times as many cores as the largest supercomputer in the world, Frontier, which has 8.7 million cores. Unlike any known GPU-based cluster, Andromeda delivers near-perfect scaling via simple data parallelism across GPT-class large language models, including GPT-3, GPT-J and GPT-NeoX.