The US overtakes Japan and occupies the top of the Top 500 supercomputers list

The US overtook Japan and took the top position in the world in the Top 500 most powerful supercomputing systems ranking. The Frontier supercomputing system from Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) took first place, beating last year’s champion, Japan’s Fugaku supercomputing system.

The supercomputer is still being integrated and tested at ORNL in Tennessee, but will eventually be operated by the US Air Force and Department of Energy, according to Engadget.

The Frontier supercomputer, powered by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE)’s Cray EX platform, is the leading machine with big margins. This is the first (known) true exascale system, peaking at 1.1 exaflops on the Linmark benchmark. Exascale refers to computer systems capable of computing at least 10¹⁸ floating point operations per second (1 exa FLOPS). The term usually refers to the performance of supercomputer systems. Fugaku with 442 petaflops of computing power was still enough to take first place two years earlier.

Frontier is also the most economical supercomputer in the world today. Running at just 52.23 gigaflops per watt, it beat the Japanese MN-3 system for first place on the Green500 list.

“The fact that the fastest machine in the world is also the most energy efficient is truly amazing,” ORNL Lab Director Thomas Zacharia said at a press conference.

Other supercomputers in the TOP10 include an HPE Cray EX system installed at EuroHPC in Finland (151.9 petaflops), an IBM-built Summit system using 22-core Power (NVIDIA Tesla V100 CPU and GPU ( 148.8 petaflops).

China holds two places in the top 10 with the Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer by the National Research Center for Parallel Computing Technology & Engineering (NRPCC) and Tianhe-2A by the National University of Defense Technology of China (NUDT). ) make. However, China is said to already have no less than two exascale systems (by Linmark standards) on the new Sunway Oceanlite and Tianhe-3 systems.