TOP500 Becomes a Petaflop Club for Supercomputers
The 53rd edition of the TOP500 marks a milestone in the 26-year history of the list. For the first time, all 500 systems deliver a petaflop or more on the High Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark, with the entry level to the list now at 1.022 petaflops.
The top of the list remains largely unchanged, with only two new entries in the top 10, one of which was an existing system that was upgraded with additional capacity.
Two IBM-built supercomputers, Summit and Sierra, installed at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, respectively, retain the first two positions on the list. Both derive their computational power from Power 9 CPUs and NVIDIA V100 GPUs. The Summit system slightly improved its HPL result from six months ago, delivering a record 148.6 petaflops, while the number two Sierra system remains unchanged at 94.6 petaflops.
The #100 system is at 2.3957 petaflops, up from 1.9661 petaflops in November 2018. The #500 system was at 0.8748 petaflops in November.
Complete list. The leading Green500 system is still "Shoubu system B" at 17.604 gigaflops per Watt.
Previously: Latest Top500 List: Upgraded US Supercomputers Claim Top Two Spots; China has Most Systems
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Upgraded US Supercomputers Claim top two Spots on Top500 List:
China has more of the 500 fastest machines on the planet than ever, and the US hits an all-time low.
The US now can claim the top two machines on a list of the 500 fastest supercomputers, as Sierra, an IBM machine for nuclear weapons research at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, edged out a Chinese system that last year was the very fastest.
The Top500 list ranks supercomputers based on how quickly they perform a mathematical calculation test called Linpack. The top machine, IBM's Summit at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, had claimed the No. 1 spot in June with a speed of 122.3 quintillion mathematical operations per second, or 122.3 petaflops.
But an upgrade gave it a score of 143.5 petaflops on the newest list. To match that speed, each person on the planet would have to perform 19 million calculations per second. Sierra got an upgrade, too, boosting its performance from 71.6 petaflops to 94.6 petaflops and lifting it from third place to second.
The top machine on the first TOP500 list in June of 1993 was a Thinking Machines Corporation CM-5/1024 with 1,024 cores and was rated at Rpeak of 131.0 GFlop/s and Rmax of 59.7 GFlop/s. The least performant system is listed at the bottom of Page 5 of he list was a C3840 Made by Sharp of Japan which had 4 cores and had RPeak and RMax scores of 0.5 and 0.4 GFlop/s respectively. The fasted Cray Research machine in 1993 rated 9th place at 15.2/13.7 GFlop/s for RPeak and RMax.
Where on that first list would today's smartphones land?
More at Top500 and The Register.
El Capitan Supercomputer Detailed: AMD CPUs & GPUs To Drive 2 Exaflops of Compute
This afternoon the DOE and HPE are announcing the architectural details of the [El Capitan] supercomputer, revealing that AMD will be providing both the CPUs and accelerators (GPUs), as well as revising the performance estimate for the supercomputer. Already expected to be the fastest of the US's exascale systems, El Capitan was originally commissioned as a 1.5 exaflop system seven months ago. However thanks to some late configuration changes, the DOE now expects the system to reach 2 exaflops once it's fully installed, which would cement its place at the top of the US's supercomputer inventory.
Overall, El Capitan is the second (and apparently final) system being built as part of the US DOE's CORAL-2 program for supercomputers. Like the similar Frontier system, El Capitan comes with a $600 million price tag and is intended to ensure the US's leadership in supercomputers in the exascale era. LLNL will be using the system to replace Sierra, their current IBM Power 9 + NVIDIA Volta supercomputer. All told, El Capitan will be 16 times more powerful than the system it replaces. LLNL will be using it primary for nuclear weapons modeling – substituting for actual weapon testing – while the system will also see secondary use as a research system in other fields, particularly those where machine learning can be applied.
[...] On the CPU side of matters, AMD will be supplying a standard version of their Zen 4-based "Genoa" EPYC processor. As it's still two generations out from AMD's current wares, the amount of information on Zen 4/Genoa is limited, but AMD is promising support for next-generation memory, Infinity Fabric 3, as well as broad promises of both single and multi-threaded performance leadership. Notably, this is a greater level of detail on the CPU than we currently have for Frontier, which is using an unspecified and customized next-generation EPYC CPU.
See also: AMD's CPU-to-GPU Infinity Fabric Detailed
Also at Wccftech.
Previously:
Cray and AMD Will Build a 1.5 Exaflops Supercomputer by 2021
June 2019 TOP500 List: All 500 Systems Above 1 Petaflops
(Score: 3, Informative) by Gaaark on Tuesday June 18 2019, @06:29PM (2 children)
all are running Linux now.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 3, Informative) by RS3 on Tuesday June 18 2019, @07:02PM (1 child)
Yeah, pretty much. If you look at the https://top500.org/statistics/list/ [top500.org] list (choose "Category" Operating Systems, click "Submit"), they list "Linux" as almost 50%, then CentOS, etc. What is "Linux"? IE, if they know CentOS from RHEL from Ubuntu from Suse from Cray Linux, why is there a big "Linux" category? Kind of useless.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 18 2019, @07:23PM
Most of them are custom distributions that cannot be categorized into the mainstream ones. So it should read "Custom Linux" instead.
(Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Tuesday June 18 2019, @06:58PM (7 children)
note, the #1 system is also the #3 green system
note also the #3 and #4 chinese systems are considerably less efficient that #1.
My $0.02....
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday June 18 2019, @07:16PM (1 child)
Now's a good time to start taking bets on the megawattage of the world's first exaflops supercomputer. Should be between 20 and 60.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 19 2019, @02:08AM
Depends on if they're mining Bitcoins or not.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday June 18 2019, @07:16PM (4 children)
Was it a design criteria and they failed, or was it a nice-to-have that they didn't sweat ?
The Japanese win at the efficiency game.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday June 18 2019, @08:00PM (3 children)
If you have less money and aren't competing for the top spot, you'll choose efficiency.
The efficiency can be attributed to the PEZY-SC [wikichip.org] manycore chips, designed by a Japanese company [wikichip.org] that receives government funding.
PEZY-SC3 should be out this year. Looks like it quadruples the cores (roughly), increases frequency by 33%, and increases performance by 5.333x. Power consumption (dissipation) increases from 180 W to 400 W. So it could increase the gigaflops per Watt by 2.4x (not exactly since it is used alongside Xeons).
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 18 2019, @10:12PM (2 children)
amazing ... 25 x 25 mm of silicon can "waste" the energy of an irradiated silicon panel of 2 whole square meter.
and my android still comes with a default calculator that cant do square roots.
my wifi still sucks.
good weather satellit maps are still hard to come by.
still no multi purpose robots.
traffic still sucks.
insider trading remains the only way to not be a gambler on the stock market.
usesless machines for war are still developed for the purpose of "energy security" since we still dont want to moonshot the mini sun on earth.
.its good i "dont know" about these calculation monsters since i cannot even begin to understand how they affect my daily life ..
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Tuesday June 18 2019, @10:42PM
Power consumption could plummet after field effect and GAA transistors run out of steam and something new [soylentnews.org] takes over. But the fact is that power efficiency is increasing, as can be seen by tracking the progress of the Green500 list. 400 Watts gets you a lot more performance today than it did 10 or 20 years ago.
Most people don't need a square root in their daily calculating. Download a scientific/graphing calculator app if you need to do more complex calculations.
Get a Wi-Fi repeater or new 2x2 MIMO 802.11ac/ax/be devices (on both ends).
National Weather Service has all the forecasts and maps [weather.gov] you need.
Too bad about the robots. You'll have to settle for a significant other. Mail order?
Self-driving cars should be around within 5 years.
If you can't predict the future or time travel, why would you expect stock market success?
U.S. has all the oil and natural gas it needs at home. Prices are kept low partially to prevent the U.S. from tapping these resources. So it is a win-win. Commercial fusion isn't as easy as you think it is and any "moonshot" could get bogged down by pursuing the wrong approach (see ITER).
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday June 19 2019, @04:29PM
> .its good i "dont know" about these calculation monsters since i cannot even begin to understand how they affect my daily life ..
Besides the ones which simulated enough physics to end up with things like GPS, and the ones which simulate enough biology to end up with a cure for your future cancer, there are the ones who simulate enough atmosphere to help your friendly farmers grow and protect the harvest you eat.