The United States is at the top of the supercomputer world in the TOP500 of the most powerful systems. The Frontier system from Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), running on AMD EPYC processors, won first place in last year’s champion – the Japanese ARM A64X Fugaku system. It is still in the process of being integrated and tested at ORNL in Tennessee, but will eventually be operated by the US Air Force and the US Department of Energy.
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The Frontier, powered by Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s (HPE) Cray EX platform, was also the best long-distance car at the time. This is the first (known) true exaflop system to reach a peak of 1.1 exaflops in the Linmark benchmark. Fugaku, meanwhile, managed to achieve less than half of that figure – 442 petaflops, which is still enough to stay in first place for the previous two years.
Frontier also proved to be the most efficient supercomputer. Consuming only 52.23 gigaflops per watt, it bypassed the Japanese MN-3 system and took first place in the Green500 list. “The fact that the fastest car in the world is also the most energy efficient is simply amazing,” said Thomas Zacharias, director of the ORNL laboratory, at a news conference.
Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) US Frontier System
The TOP10 also includes another HPE Cray EX system installed at EuroHPC in Finland (151.9 petaflops), a Summit system built by IBM on 22-core Power processors (and NVIDIA Tesla V100 graphics processors (148.8 petaflops), and Sierra Lawrence Livermore, a more compact version of the Summit, which reached a speed of 94.6 petaflops / s.
China ranked two in the top ten with its Sunway TaihuLight from the National Parallel Engineering and Technology Research Center (NRCPC) and Tianhe-2A, built by the Chinese National University of Defense Technology (NUDT). However, according to rumors, China already has at least two exaflop systems (according to the Linmark benchmark) on the new Sunway Oceanlite and Tianhe-3 systems. However, due to the current state of semiconductor policy, China is rumored not to disclose any new benchmarks or important achievements.