Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Frontier supercomputer has stayed at the top of TOP500’s list of supercomputers, making it the best in the world. In addition, it’s still the only system that has an HPL performance above one Exaflop/s. In second and third place are Japan’s Fugaku supercomputer and Finland’s LUMI, but both lag well behind Frontier.
Prior to Frontier taking the top spot in June 2022 TOP500 list, the current second-place Fugaku held the top place for several years. LUMI came into the third position in June and has held onto that position after a hardware upgrade.
The Frontier supercomputer is based on the HPE Cray EX235a architecture and uses an AMD EPYC 64C 2 GHz processor. It has a massive 8.73 million cores and has a power efficiency rating of 52.23 gigaflops/watt. TOP500 says that Frontier uses gigabit Ethernet for data transfers.
Aside from scoring very well on the TOP500 list, Frontier comes 6th in TOP500’s GREEN500 list. A similarly named system, Frontier Test & Development System (TDS), which is also based at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, comes in second place in the GREEN500 list.
Some of Neowin’s early coverage about TOP500 mentions that the Sunway TaihuLight came top in June 2016. You may be interested to hear that this machine now ranks 7th. The six-and-a-half years have given other countries time to develop new supercomputers to significantly leapfrog the TaihuLight.