TOP500 has announced that Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has held its lead in the TOP500 supercomputer list with its Frontier system. The system is powered by an AMD processor, a popular choice among the top 10 supercomputers.
Between June 2022 and November 2022, the Frontier supercomputer stagnated in terms of performance improvements. However, between November 2022 and June 2022, it managed to increase its HPL score from 1.02 Eflop/s to 1.194 EFlop/s.
The Frontier supercomputer is based on the HPE Cray EX235a architecture and uses AMD EPYC 64C 2GHz processors. There are 8,699,904 cores powering the computer and it has an efficiency rating of 52.59 Gflops/watt. TOP500 said it uses a gigabit ethernet for data transfer.
To beat the Frontier supercomputer, it will likely require researchers from other institutions to build a whole new supercomputer.
In second place on the June 2022 TOP500 list is the Fugaku supercomputer and that only has a score of 442.01 PFlop/s (0.42 EFlop/s). Another interesting difference between Frontier and Fugaku is that Frontier has 1,069,056 more cores than Fugaku, but uses an extra 7,000 kW of power.
The third and fourth spots on the list are filled by the LUMI and Leonardo supercomputers from Finland and Italy respectively. Notably, there are no Chinese supercomputers in the top five machines.
China’s best supercomputer is the Sunway TaihuLight. It uses a massive 10,648,600 cores and achieves just 93.01 PFlop/s; this is the most cores in the top 10 supercomputers. It was the best supercomputer in 2016 but many other machines have overtaken it since then.
According to a report on Neowin from 2017, China was looking to achieve exascale computing by 2020. It’s unclear what has happened to these ambitions but it’s already running three years over, perhaps we’ll hear more in the November 2022 results.
