US regains Top500 supercomputer crown

29th June 2018
US regains Top500 supercomputer crown

Images  Top  Summit supercomputer, the world's most powerful today
Bottom: nvidia-telsa-v100 processor.

FRANKFURT, Germany; BERKELEY, Calif.; and KNOXVILLE, Tenn. June 29 2018: For the first time since November 2012, the US claims the most powerful supercomputer in the world,  in the latest Top500 rankings, leading a significant turnover in which four of the five top systems were either new or substantially upgraded.
Summit, an IBM-built supercomputer now running at the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), captured the number one spot with a performance of 122.3 petaflops on High Performance Linpack (HPL), the benchmark used to rank the TOP500 list. Summit has 4,356 nodes, each one equipped with two 22-core Power9 CPUs, and six NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs.
Sunway TaihuLight, a system developed by China’s National Research Center of Parallel Computer Engineering & Technology (NRCPC) and installed at the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi, drops to number two after leading the list for the past two years. Its HPL mark of 93 petaflops has remained unchanged since it came online in June 2016.|
Sierra, a new system at the DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory took the number three spot, delivering 71.6 petaflops on HPL. Built by IBM, Sierra’s architecture is quite similar to that of Summit, with each of its 4,320 nodes powered by two Power9 CPUs plus four NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs and using the same Mellanox EDR InfiniBand as the system interconnect.
Tianhe-2A, also known as Milky Way-2A, moved down two notches into the number four spot, despite receiving a major upgrade that replaced its five-year-old Xeon Phi accelerators with custom-built Matrix-2000 coprocessors. The new hardware increased the system’s HPL performance from 33.9 petaflops to 61.4 petaflops, while bumping up its power consumption by less than four percent. Tianhe-2A was developed by China’s National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) and is installed at the National Supercomputer Center in Guangzhou, China.
The new AI Bridging Cloud Infrastructure (ABCI) is the fifth-ranked system on the list, with an HPL mark of 19.9 petaflops. The Fujitsu-built supercomputer is powered by 20-core Xeon Gold processors along with NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs. It’s installed in Japan at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST).

Vendor highlights
For the first time, the leading HPC manufacturer of supercomputers on the list is not from the US. Chinese-based Lenovo took the lead with 23.8 percent (122 systems) of all installed machines
, followed by HPE with 15.8 percent (79 systems), Inspur with 13.6 percent (68 systems), Cray with 11.2 percent (56 systems), and Sugon with 11 percent (55 systems). Of these, only Lenovo, Inspur, and Sugon captured additional system share compared to half a year ago.

GPU rules
In the latest TOP500 rankings, 56 percent of the additional flops were a result of NVIDIA Tesla GPUs running in new supercomputers – that according to the Nvidians, who enjoy keeping track of such things. In this case, most of those additional flops came from three top systems new to the list: Summit, Sierra, and the AI Bridging Cloud Infrastructure (ABCI). 
India in Top500 see our story here