Monday, May 30, 2022

There Is A New World's Fastest Supercomputer (maybe) NVDA

From the measurement geeks at Top500, May 30:

Highlights - June 2022

This is the 59th edition of the TOP500.

The 59th edition of the TOP500 revealed the Frontier system to be the first true exascale machine with an HPL score of 1.102 Exaflop/s.

We have a new No 1, the Frontier system at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Tennessee, USA. Frontier brings the pole position back to the USA after it was held for 2 years by the Fugaku system at RIKEN Center for Computational Science (R-CCS) in Kobe, Japan. The Frontier system is currently being integrated and tested at ORNL. It has a peak performance of 1.6 ExaFlop/s and has achieved so far, an HPL benchmark score of 1.102 Eflop/s. On the HPL-AI benchmark, which measure performance for mixed precision calculation, Frontier already demonstrated 6.86 Exaflops!

We also have a new No. 3, the LUMI system at EuroHPC/CSC in Finland, and the largest system in Europe. The third newcomer to the top 10 is at No. 10, the Adastra system at GENCI-CINES in France.

All 3 new systems in the top 10 are based on the latest HPE Cray EX235a architecture, which combines 3rd Gen AMD EPYC™ CPUs optimized for HPC and AI with AMD Instinct™ 250X accelerators, and Slingshot interconnects.

Here is a summary of the system at the Top10:

  • Frontier is the new No. 1 system in the TOP500. This HPE Cray EX system is the first US system with a peak performance exceeding one ExaFlop/s. It is currently being integrated and tested at the ORNL in Tennessee, USA, where it will be operated by the Department of Energy (DOE). It currently has achieved 1.102 Exaflop/s using 8,730,112 cores. The new HPE Cray EX architecture combines 3rd Gen AMD EPYC™ CPUs optimized for HPC and AI with AMD Instinct™ 250X accelerators and Slingshot-11 interconnect.
  • Fugaku, now the No. 2 system, is installed at the RIKEN Center for Computational Science (R-CCS) in Kobe, Japan. It has 7,630,848 cores which allowed it to achieve an HPL benchmark score of 442 Pflop/s. This puts it 3x ahead of the No. 3 system in the list. 
  • The new LUMI system, another HPE Cray EX system installed at EuroHPC center at CSC in Finland, is the new No. 3 with a performance of 151.9 Pflop/s just ahead of No 4. The European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) is pooling European resources to develop top-of-the-range Exascale supercomputers for processing big data. One of the pan-European pre-Exascale supercomputers, LUMI, is in CSC's data center in Kajaani, Finland.
  • Summit, an IBM-built system at ORNL in Tennessee, USA, is now listed at the No. 4 spot worldwide with a performance of 148.8 Pflop/s on the HPL benchmark which is used to rank the TOP500 list. Summit has 4,356 nodes, each housing two Power9 CPUs with 22 cores and six NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs, each with 80 streaming multiprocessors (SM). The nodes are linked together with a Mellanox dual-rail EDR InfiniBand network.
  • Sierra, a system at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, CA, USA, is at No. 5. Its architecture is very similar to the #4 systems Summit. It is built with 4,320 nodes with two Power9 CPUs and four NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs. Sierra achieved 94.6 Pflop/s.

....MUCH MORE

Two European (LUMI and France's Adastra), two Chinese and Japan's Fugaku  add diversity to the U.S. national laboratories machines with NVIDIA's Selene being the only corporate machine in the top10. Germany and Italy have machines in the 11th and 12th fastest positions with Microsoft's Azure in the 13th spot. Here are the first 100 fastest.

The highlights press release (above) takes pains to point out how deeply NVDA accelerators have penetrated supercomputer architecture: 

Highlights from the List

A total of 170 systems on the list are using accelerator/co-processor technology, up from 151 six months ago. 84 of these use NVIDIA Volta chips, 54 use NVIDIA Ampere, and 8 systems with NVIDIA Pascal....

And here is the "maybe", from DataCenterDynamics, May 30:

Oak Ridge's exascale 'Frontier' system named world's most powerful supercomputer on Top500
But may still be behind a secret Chinese supercomputer