TOP500 announced that Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) maintains its leadership in the TOP500 supercomputer list with its Frontier supercomputer system. This system is powered by AMD processors, a popular choice among the top 10 supercomputers.
The Frontier supercomputer suffered a pause in performance improvements between June 2022 and November 2022. However, after November 2022, it managed to increase its HPL score from 1.02 Eflops/sec to an impressive 1.194 EFlops/sec.
The Frontier supercomputer is based on the HPE Cray EX235a architecture and uses AMD EPYC 64C 2GHz processors. It has 8,699,904 cores powering the computer and has an efficiency rating of 52.59 Gflops/watt. TOP500 states that it uses a gigabit ethernet connection for data transfer.
Researchers at other institutions will likely need to create an entirely new supercomputer to beat the Frontier supercomputer.
Second on the June 2023 TOP500 list is the Fugaku supercomputer with a score of only 442.01 PFlop/s (0.42 EFlop/s). Another notable difference between Frontier and Fugaku is that Frontier has 1,069,056 more cores than Fugaku, but uses about 7,000 kW less power.
Third and fourth places on the list are occupied by LUMI and Leonardo supercomputers from Finland and Italy, respectively. Chinese supercomputers do not appear among the top five on the list.
China’s top supercomputer, Sunway TaihuLight, uses an enormous 10,648,600 cores and reaches just 93.01 PFlop/s. This computer stands out as the member with the most cores among the top 10 of the list. Sunway TaihuLight was the world’s best supercomputer in 2016, but many other machines have since surpassed it.
40907
