The world’s top 500 supercomputers are released! One year after “abandoning the exam”, China’s number of supercomputers is still far ahead

In less than half a year, the world’s most authoritative supercomputer TOP500 list has been updated again!

On November 14, at the SC22 conference held in Dallas, USA, the new issue of "The World's Fastest 500 Supercomputers" was announced.

Compared with the June issue, the top 10 in the new issue only have slight adjustments, and the top 3 remain unchanged.

Frontier from Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) still tops the list with 1.102 EFlop/s, and its HPL score is almost three times that of the second place. This is a major victory for computer science, and it is also the only "Exascale supercomputer" on this issue's TOP500 list.

"Fugaku" of the Riken Center for Computational Science (R-CCS) in Kobe, Japan, had two consecutive times before being squeezed out by the Frontier machine. year to occupy the top spot. This time the list is still ranked 2nd.

LUMI, "Europe's fastest supercomputer", which ranked third in the previous list, also successfully retained the top three this time s position. However, LUMI has undergone a major upgrade this time, doubling the size of the machine and achieving an HPL score of 0.309 EFlop/s.

The only new machine in the top ten this time is the Leonardo system of EuroHPC/CINECA located in Bologna, Italy. The machine achieved an HPL score of 0.174 EFlop/s with 1,463,616 cores, ranking 4th.

Due to the strong rise of Leonardo, compared with the 6th and 9th places in the previous period, China’s two supercomputers "Sunway·TaihuLight" ” and “Tianhe 2A” were moved down one place to 7th and 10th.

Since 2017, the speed of improvement in supercomputing power has begun to slow down, resulting in the "E-class supercomputing" that has been talked about for several years until last year. This may indicate that Moore's Law is ending.

AMD is still yes, NVIDIA GPU "seeks to fail alone"

In the field of supercomputer CPUs, as the first choice for HPC systems, AMD's advantages have become increasingly obvious.

According to statistics, although only 20.2% of the machines in this Top500 use AMD X86 processors and 75.8% of the machines are based on Intel X86 processors, half of the new systems and 75 % of new performance - all relying on AMD chips.

Among them, Frontier uses Gen AMD EPYC processors optimized for HPC and AI, as does the third-ranked LUMI system.

It is expected that as time goes by, the number of supercomputers using AMD chips will continue to rise, while Intel’s share will continue to decline.

In terms of GPU, the competition is between Nvidia and AMD.

With the emergence of Frontier "copycats" in Europe and the United States, AMD has also gained some quite important shares in the high-end market.

Currently, the most watched supercomputer in the world is Argonne National Laboratory’s all-Intel Aurora supercomputer—a supercomputer with twice the performance of Frontier.

However, the machine has been delayed since 2018 due to Intel's failure to deliver the chips on time. In September, Intel announced that it had begun delivering its Sapphire Rapids CPU and Ponte Vecchio GPU blades to Argonne for integration into the system.

In the newly updated TOP500 list, we did not find this "Thanos" supercomputer.

China: ranked first in quantity and only fourth in computing power

Although it is at a disadvantage in terms of single unit performance, after this issue of the TOP500 list, China It is still called "the biggest unknown" by foreign media.

In this issue of the list, although China only has two supercomputers, "Sunway TaihuLight" and "Tianhe-2", among the top 10, there are a total of 500 supercomputers on the list. , China occupies 162 units, which is down from 173 units last year, but still 31 units more than Europe and 36 units more than the United States, firmly ranking first in the world.

In terms of computing power, the United States ranks first with 43.2% of deployed computing power, Japan ranks second with 19.6%, and China ranks fourth with 10.6%.

It is worth noting that China has stopped submitting the most advanced supercomputing system information to the TOP500 committee, which has also led to a decline in the global supercomputer When counting the numbers - foreign media had to exclude China's data.

Last year, foreign media reported that China is likely to have developed an E-class supercomputer earlier than the United States, and may even have more than one.

The first one is the 1.3 exaflops "Sunway Ocean Light" of the Wuxi National Supercomputing Center. The system was tested using the High-Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark in March 2021 and achieved a sustained performance of 1.05 exaflops;

The second one is located at the Guangzhou National Supercomputer Center Tianhe-3 system. It is also said to have reached a peak capacity of 1.3 exaflops, with sustained performance of over 1 exaflops in HPL testing.

However, neither of these two machines appears in the Top500 rankings from 2021 to now.

Earlier this year, the United States banned the export of AMD Instinct and Nvidia's A100 and H100 GPUs to China and Russia for exceeding newly mandated performance limits. Nvidia is even going so far as to weaken its A100 in order to continue supplying China with chips.

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