The 64th edition of the TOP500 reveals that El Capitan has achieved the top spot and is officially the third system to reach exascale computing after Frontier and Aurora. Both systems have since moved down to No. 2 and No. 3 spots, respectively. Additionally, new systems have found their way onto the Top 10.

The new El Capitan system at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, U.S.A., has debuted as the most powerful system on the list with an HPL score of 1.742 EFlop/s. It has 11,039,616 combined CPU and GPU cores and is based on AMD 4th generation EPYC processors with 24 cores at 1.8 GHz and AMD Instinct MI300A accelerators. El Capitan relies on a Cray Slingshot 11 network for data transfer and achieves an energy efficiency of 58.89 GigaFLOPS/watt. This power efficiency rating helped El Capitan achieve No. 18 on the GREEN500 list as well.

The supercomputer Fugaku, jointly developed by RIKEN and Fujitsu, has successfully retained the top spot for 10 consecutive terms in two major high-performance computer rankings, HPCG and Graph500 BFS (Breadth-First Search), and has also taken sixth place for the TOP500 and fourth place for the HPL-MxP rankings. The HPCG is a performance ranking for computing methods often used for real-world applications, and the Graph500 ranks systems based on graph analytic performance, an important element in data-intensive workloads. The results of the rankings were announced on November 19 at SC24, which is currently being held at Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta, Georgia, USA.

The top ranking on Graph500 was won by a collaboration involving RIKEN, Institute of Science Tokyo, Fixstars Corporation, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation, and Fujitsu. It earned a score of 204.068 TeraTEPS with Fugaku's 152,064 nodes, an improvement of 38.038 TeraTEPS in performance from the previous measurement. This is the first time that a score of over 200 TeraTEPS has been recorded on the Graph500 benchmark.

According to ServeTheHome, Intel has decided to discontinue its high-performance computing (HPC) product line, Ponte Vecchio, and shift its focus towards developing its next-generation data center GPU, codenamed Falcon Shores. This decision comes as Intel aims to streamline its operations and concentrate its resources on the most promising and competitive offerings. The Ponte Vecchio GPU, released in January of 2023, was intended to be Intel's flagship product for the HPC market, competing against the likes of NVIDIA's H100 and AMD's Instinct MI series. However, despite its impressive specifications and features, Ponte Vecchio faced significant delays and challenges in its development and production cycle. Intel's decision to abandon Ponte Vecchio is pragmatic, recognizing the intense competition and rapidly evolving landscape of the data center GPU market.

By pivoting its attention to Falcon Shores, Intel aims to deliver a more competitive and cutting-edge solution that can effectively challenge the dominance of its rivals. Falcon Shores, slated for release in 2025, is expected to leverage Intel's latest process node and architectural innovations. Currently, Intel has Gaudi 2 and Gaudi 3 accelerators for AI. However, the HPC segment is left without a clear leader in the company's product offerings. Intel's Ponte Vecchio is powering Aurora exascale supercomputer, which is the latest submission to the TOP500 supercomputer lists. This is also coming after the Rialto Bridge cancellation, which was supposed to be an HPC-focused card. In the future, the company will focus only on the Falcon Shores accelerator, which will unify HPC and AI needs for high-precision FP64 and lower-precision FP16/INT8.

The 63rd edition of the TOP500 reveals that Frontier has once again claimed the top spot, despite no longer being the only exascale machine on the list. Additionally, a new system has found its way into the Top 10.

The Frontier system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, USA remains the most powerful system on the list with an HPL score of 1.206 EFlop/s. The system has a total of 8,699,904 combined CPU and GPU cores, an HPE Cray EX architecture that combines 3rd Gen AMD EPYC CPUs optimized for HPC and AI with AMD Instinct MI250X accelerators, and it relies on Cray's Slingshot 11 network for data transfer. On top of that, this machine has an impressive power efficiency rating of 52.93 GFlops/Watt - putting Frontier at the No. 13 spot on the GREEN500.

Lenovo (HKSE: 992) (ADR: LNVGY) has today announced that the General Purpose Partition of the MareNostrum 5, a new pre-exascale supercomputer running on Lenovo's HPC infrastructure, has been classified as the top x86 general-purpose cluster on the recently published TOP500 list of the most powerful supercomputers globally.

Officially inaugurated at Barcelona Supercomputing Center on December 21st, MareNostrum 5 has been built for the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU). The pre-exascale supercomputer will bolster the EU's mission to provide Europe with the most advanced supercomputing technology and accelerate the capacity for artificial intelligence (AI) research, enabling new scientific advances that will help solve global challenges. It aims to empower a wide range of complex HPC-specific applications, from climate research and engineering to material science and earth sciences, adeptly handling tasks that extend beyond the capabilities of cloud computing.

The 62nd edition of the TOP500 reveals that the Frontier system retains its top spot and is still the only exascale machine on the list. However, five new or upgraded systems have shaken up the Top 10.

Housed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee, USA, Frontier leads the pack with an HPL score of 1.194 EFlop/s - unchanged from the June 2023 list. Frontier utilizes AMD EPYC 64C 2GHz processors and is based on the latest HPE Cray EX235a architecture. The system has a total of 8,699,904 combined CPU and GPU cores. Additionally, Frontier has an impressive power efficiency rating of 52.59 GFlops/watt and relies on HPE's Slingshot 11 network for data transfer.

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.

Increasing its HPL score from 1.02 Eflop/s in November 2022 to an impressive 1.194 Eflop/s on this list, Frontier was able to improve upon its score after a stagnation between June 2022 and November 2022. Considering exascale was only a goal to aspire to just a few years ago, a roughly 17% increase here is an enormous success. Additionally, Frontier earned a score of 9.95 Eflop/s on the HLP-MxP benchmark, which measures performance for mixed-precision calculation. This is also an increase over the 7.94 EFlop/s that the system achieved on the previous list and nearly 10 times more powerful than the machine's HPL score. Frontier is based on the HPE Cray EX235a architecture and utilizes AMD EPYC 64C 2 GHz processors. It also has 8,699,904 cores and an incredible energy efficiency rating of 52.59 Gflops/watt. It also relies on gigabit ethernet for data transfer.

NVIDIA today announced a supercomputer built on the NVIDIA Grace CPU Superchip, adding to a wave of new energy-efficient supercomputers based on the Arm Neoverse platform. The Isambard 3 supercomputer to be based at the Bristol & Bath Science Park, in the U.K., will feature 384 Arm-based NVIDIA Grace CPU Superchips to power medical and scientific research, and is expected to deliver 6x the performance and energy efficiency of Isambard 2, placing it among Europe's most energy-efficient systems.

It will achieve about 2.7 petaflops of FP64 peak performance and consume less than 270 kilowatts of power, ranking it among the world's three greenest non-accelerated supercomputers. The project is being led by the University of Bristol, as part of the research consortium the GW4 Alliance, together with the universities of Bath, Cardiff and Exeter.

The 60th edition of the TOP500 reveals that the Frontier system is still the only true exascale machine on the list.

With an HPL score of 1.102 EFlop/s, the Frontier machine at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) did not improve upon the score it reached on the June 2022 list. That said, Frontier's near-tripling of the HPL score received by second-place winner is still a major victory for computer science. On top of that, Frontier demonstrated a score of 7.94 EFlop/s on the HPL-MxP benchmark, which measures performance for mixed-precision calculation. Frontier is based on the HPE Cray EX235a architecture and it relies on AMD EPYC 64C 2 GHz processor. The system has 8,730,112 cores and a power efficiency rating of 52.23 gigaflops/watt. It also relies on gigabit ethernet for data transfer.

Supercomputing game has been chasing various barriers over the years. This has included MegaFLOP, GigaFLOP, TeraFLOP, PetaFLOP, and now ExaFLOP computing. Today, we are witnessing for the first time an introduction of an Exascale-level machine contained at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Called the Frontier, this system is not really new. We have known about its upcoming features for months now. What is new is the fact that it was completed and is successfully running at ORNL's facilities. Based on the HPE Cray EX235a architecture, the system uses 3rd Gen AMD EPYC 64-core processors with a 2 GHz frequency. In total, the system has 8,730,112 cores that work in conjunction with AMD Instinct MI250X GPUs.

As of today's TOP500 supercomputers list, the system is overtaking Fugaku's spot to become the fastest supercomputer on the planet. Delivering a sustained HPL (High-Performance Linpack) score of 1.102 Exaflop/s, it features a 52.23 GigaFLOPs/watt power efficiency rating. In the HPL-AI metric, dedicated to measuring the system's AI capabilities, the Frontier machine can output 6.86 exaFLOPs at reduced precisions. This alone is, of course, not a capable metric for Exascale machines as AI works with INT8/FP16/FP32 formats, while the official results are measured in FP64 double-precision form. Fugaku, the previous number one, scores about 2 ExaFLOPs in HPL-AI while delivering "only" 442 PetaFlop/s in HPL FP64 benchmarks.

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.

While there were no other changes to the positions of the systems in the Top10, Perlmutter at NERSC improved its performance to 70.9 Pflop/s. Housed at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Perlmutter's increased performance couldn't move it from its previously held No. 5 spot.

NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) today reported record revenue for the second quarter ended August 1, 2021, of $6.51 billion, up 68 percent from a year earlier and up 15 percent from the previous quarter, with record revenue from the company's Gaming, Data Center and Professional Visualization platforms. GAAP earnings per diluted share for the quarter were $0.94, up 276 percent from a year ago and up 24 percent from the previous quarter. Non-GAAP earnings per diluted share were $1.04, up 89 percent from a year ago and up 14 percent from the previous quarter.

"NVIDIA's pioneering work in accelerated computing continues to advance graphics, scientific computing and AI," said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. "Enabled by the NVIDIA platform, developers are creating the most impactful technologies of our time - from natural language understanding and recommender systems, to autonomous vehicles and logistic centers, to digital biology and climate science, to metaverse worlds that obey the laws of physics.

Fugaku is Japan's supercomputer that has been developed as a core system for the innovative High-Performance Computing Infrastructure (HPCI) promoted by Japan's Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT). In 2014, RIKEN and Fujitsu began joint development of Fugaku and completed delivery of all racks in May 2020. Since then, they have developed and optimized the user environment in preparation for the commencement of shared use.

In the meantime, Fugaku has claimed the world's top spot for two consecutive terms in June and November 2020 in four categories on the major high-performance computer rankings: the TOP500, HPCG, HPL-AI, as well as the Graph 500, and has been used on a trial basis under the "Program for Promoting Research on the Supercomputer Fugaku", "research projects aimed to combat COVID-19", etc. since April 2020. In these trials, two projects, "Study on Large-Scale Numerical Fluid Simulation" and "Largest Ever Meteorological Calculation" have already been selected as the ACM Gordon Bell Prize finalists. In addition, research on "Prediction and Countermeasures for Infection by Virus Contaminated Droplet in Indoor Environment" has led to changes in people's lifestyles, and Fugaku is already making steady progress toward becoming a key technological platform for science and for building Society 5.0.

Fugaku—the Arm technology-based supercomputer jointly developed by RIKEN and Fujitsu—was awarded the number one spot on the Top500 list for the second time in a row. This achievement further highlights the rapidly evolving demands of high-performance computing (HPC) that Arm technology uniquely addresses through the unmatched combination of power efficiency, performance, and scalability.

In addition to the great work RIKEN and Fujitsu have done, we're seeing more adoption for Arm-based solutions across our ecosystem. ETRI, the national computing institute of the Republic of Korea, recently announced plans to adopt the upcoming Neoverse V1 (formerly code-named Zeus) CPU design, which feature Arm Scalable Vector Extensions (SVE), for its K-AB21 system. ETRI has set a goal of 16 teraflops per CPU and 1600 teraflops per rack for AB 21 (which stands for 'Artificial Brain 21') while reducing power consumption by 60% compared to its target.

The 56th edition of the TOP500 saw the Japanese Fugaku supercomputer solidify its number one status in a list that reflects a flattening performance growth curve. Although two new systems managed to make it into the top 10, the full list recorded the smallest number of new entries since the project began in 1993.

The entry level to the list moved up to 1.32 petaflops on the High Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark, a small increase from 1.23 petaflops recorded in the June 2020 rankings. In a similar vein, the aggregate performance of all 500 systems grew from 2.22 exaflops in June to just 2.43 exaflops on the latest list. Likewise, average concurrency per system barely increased at all, growing from 145,363 cores six months ago to 145,465 cores in the current list.

NVIDIA today announced that it is building the United Kingdom's most powerful supercomputer, which it will make available to U.K. healthcare researchers using AI to solve pressing medical challenges, including those presented by COVID-19.

Expected to come online by year end, the "Cambridge-1" supercomputer will be an NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD system capable of delivering more than 400 petaflops of AI performance and 8 petaflops of Linpack performance, which would rank it No. 29 on the latest TOP500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers. It will also rank among the world's top 3 most energy-efficient supercomputers on the current Green500 list.

NVIDIA on Wednesday posted its Q2 Fiscal Year 2021 financial results, and the most startling result has been a breakdown of the company's $3.86 billion quarterly revenue among its various businesses. Turns out, that Data Center, and not Gaming, is NVIDIA's largest revenue generator for the quarter. Growing 54 percent over the previous quarter, this division contributed $1.74 billion, as opposed to $1.65 billion from Gaming (up 24 percent QoQ). The Gaming business includes NVIDIA's GeForce line of discrete graphics solutions and the GeForce NOW cloud gaming service.

Much of the growth in revenues for the Data Center business is attributable to the addition of revenues by Mellanox - a network infrastructure company NVIDIA acquired, and adoption of NVIDIA's new A100 Tensor Core GPUs by several new supercomputer projects focused on AI. NVIDIA's scalar processors now power 2/3rds of the supercomputers on the TOP500 list.

NVIDIA and Mellanox today announced that the companies have reached a definitive agreement under which NVIDIA will acquire Mellanox. Pursuant to the agreement, NVIDIA will acquire all of the issued and outstanding common shares of Mellanox for $125 per share in cash, representing a total enterprise value of approximately $6.9 billion. Once complete, the combination is expected to be immediately accretive to NVIDIA's non-GAAP gross margin, non-GAAP earnings per share and free cash flow.

The acquisition will unite two of the world's leading companies in high performance computing (HPC). Together, NVIDIA's computing platform and Mellanox's interconnects power over 250 of the world's TOP500 supercomputers and have as customers every major cloud service provider and computer maker. The data and compute intensity of modern workloads in AI, scientific computing and data analytics is growing exponentially and has put enormous performance demands on hyperscale and enterprise datacenters. While computing demand is surging, CPU performance advances are slowing as Moore's law has ended. This has led to the adoption of accelerated computing with NVIDIA GPUs and Mellanox's intelligent networking solutions.

Fujitsu today announces that its AI Bridging Cloud Infrastructure (ABCI) system has placed 5th in the world, and 1st in Japan, in the TOP500 international performance ranking of supercomputers. ABCI has also taken 8th place in the world in Green500, which ranks outstanding energy saving performance. Fujitsu developed ABCI, Japan's fastest open AI infrastructure featuring a large-scale, power-saving cloud platform geared toward AI processing, based on a tender issued by the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST).

These rankings were announced on June 25 (Japan time) at ISC 2018, an international conference on high performance computing (HPC) held in Germany. TOP500 evaluates and ranks the top 500 computer systems in the world by computational processing speed. Green500 ranks the TOP500-listed supercomputers to offer excellent examples of power consumption performance.

We previously covered in more depth the fact that the US was gearing up to overtake China's Sunway TaihuLight, then the world's fastest supercomputer, with its Summit machine, built in collaboration between IBM (with its water-cooled Power Systems AC922 nodes with 24-core processors and 96 processing threads) and NVIDIA (GV100 GPUs).

Now, this US dream has finally come to pass, and in a big way - the Summit delivers more than double the performance of China's posterchild, coming in at 200 PetaFLOPs of computing power. Summit boasts of 27,648 Volta Tensor Core GPUs and 9,216 CPUs within its 5,600 square feet. The Summit supercomputer consumes 15 MW of power (the site where it's deployed is able to deliver up to 20 MW), which is on-par with China's Sunway - but remember, it more than doubles the peak PetaFlops from 93 to 200. A good step in the battle for supercomputer supremacy, but China still has an increasing foothold in the number of systems it has employed and registered with the TOP500.

China has been increasingly - and steadily - gaining relevance in the supercomputing world, with most of the top-500 entries being controlled by that country. In fact, China can boast of having the number one supercomputer in the world, the Sunway TaihuLight, which can deliver 93 PetaFLOPS of computing power - just 3x more computational power than the second most powerful machine, China's own Tianhe-2). However, supercomputing, and the amount of money that's earned by selling processing slices of these supercomputers for private or state contractors, i a very attractive pull - especially considering the increasingly more expensive computational needs of the modern world.

The Summit is to be the United State's call to fame in that regard, bringing the country back to number one in raw, top-of-the-line single-machine supercomputing power. Summit is promising to more than double the PetaFLOPS of China's TaihuLight, to over 200 PetaFLOPs. That amounts to around 11x more processing grunt than its predecessor, the Titan, in a much smaller footprint - the Titan's 18,688 processing nodes will be condensed to just ~4,600 nodes on the Summit, with each node achieving around 40 TeraFLOPS of computing power. The hardware? IBM and NVIDIA, married in water-cooled nodes with the powerful GV100 accelerator that's still eluding us enthusiasts - but that's a question for another day.

The fiftieth TOP500 list of the fastest supercomputers in the world has China overtaking the US in the total number of ranked systems by a margin of 202 to 143. It is the largest number of supercomputers China has ever claimed on the TOP500 ranking, with the US presence shrinking to its lowest level since the list's inception 25 years ago.

Just six months ago, the US led with 169 systems, with China coming in at 160. Despite the reversal of fortunes, the 143 systems claimed by the US gives them a solid second place finish, with Japan in third place with 35, followed by Germany with 20, France with 18, and the UK with 15.

The United States has been being pushed down in the TOP500 standings for some time courtesy China, whom has taken the 1st and 2nd place seats from the US with their Sunway TaihuLight and Tianhe-2 Supercomputers (at a Linpack performance of 93 and 33.9 Petaflops, respectively). It seemed though the crown was stolen from America, 3rd place was relatively safe for the former champs. Not so. America has been pushed right off the podium in the latest TOP500 refresh... not by China though, but Switzerland?