The United States topped the Top500 ranking of the most powerful supercomputers. Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s (ORNL) Frontier system running on AMD EPYC CPUs took first place, surpassing last year’s champion Japan’s ARM A64X Fugaku system. The system is currently in the process of integration and testing at ORNL, Tennessee, and will be operated by the US Air Force and US Department of Energy when completed.
Frontier, powered by Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s (HPE) Cray EX platform, was by far the top-ranked system and stood out as the first (known) true exascale system to reach a peak of 1.1 exaflops in the Linmark benchmark. it turns out. Fugaku, on the other hand, underperformed at 442 petaflops, less than half that, which was enough to stay in the top spot for the previous two years.
Frontier also managed to be the most efficient supercomputer. Operating at 52.23 gigaflops per watt, it also ranked first in the Green500 list, surpassing Japan’s MN-3 system. “It’s simply amazing that the world’s fastest machine is also the most energy efficient,” ORNL laboratory director Thomas Zacharia said at a press conference.
Other systems in TOP10 include another HPE Cray EX system installed at EuroHPC in Finland (151.9 petaflops), power 22 cores (CPUs and NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs (148.8 petaflops) and Lawrence Livermore’s Sierra, a smaller scale version of Summit reaching a 94.6 Pflop/s.
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