Frankfurt (Germany), November 18 2020: The latest half-yearly  Top500 rankings of the world’s fastest supercomputer, released this week finds the top four contenders  unchanged since June this year, though the speeda have improved somewhat.
Fugaku from Japan remains at the top spot, growing its Arm A64FX capacity from 7,299,072 cores to 7,630,848 cores. The additional hardware enabled its new world record 442 petaflops result on HPL. This puts it three times ahead of the number two system in the list. Fugaku was constructed by Fujitsu and is installed at the RIKEN Center for Computational Science (R-CCS) in Kobe, Japan.
Summit, an IBM-built system at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee, remains the fastest system in the US with a performance of 148.8 petaflops. Summit has 4,356 nodes, each one housing two 22-core Power9 CPUs and six NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs.
Sierra, a system at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, is ranked third with an HPL mark of 94.6 petaflops. Its architecture is very similar to that of Summit, with each of its 4,320 nodes equipped with two Power9 CPUs and four 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, is listed at number four. It is powered exclusively by Sunway SW26010 processors and achieves 93 petaflops on HPL.
New at number five is Selene, an NVIDIA DGX A100 SuperPOD installed in-house at NVIDIA Corp. It was listed as number seven in June but has doubled in size, allowing it to move up the list by two positions. The system is based on AMD EPYC processors with NVIDIA’s new A100 GPUs for acceleration. Selene achieved 63.4 petaflops on HPL as a result of the upgrade.
Indian entrants
The “PARAM Siddhi – AI”, India’s fastest HPC-AI supercomputer, at C-DAC (Centre for Development of Advanced Computing), an organization under MEITY (Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology, Government of India) is ranked 63 on the TOP500 ranking, making it officially India’s largest and fastest Supercomputer.As the integration partner, Atos, and experts from C-DAC ensured that the system was implemented and operationalized in an optimal timeframe
Said Dr. Hemant Darbari, Director General, C-DAC “The state-of-the-art largest HPC-AI infrastructure of the country PARAM Siddhi – AI, equipped with the latest Next Generation technologies and C-DAC indigenous solutions implemented under National Supercomputing Mission will be dedicated for research to the Academia, Scientific and Research Community, MSMEs, Industry and the Start-ups encompassing all the areas of Artificial Intelligence including Natural Language Processing, Surveillance and Image Processing, Automotive industry, Healthcare, Robotics, Computer Vision, Recommender Systems, Education, Agriculture, Space, Defence and National Security. With C-DAC three decades expertise AI and HPC, it will result in developing innovative indigenous solutions, products and ecosystem creation for the country in line with the Atmanirbhar Bharat initiative of the Government of India.” 
For details of the three India-based systems in Top500 November 2020, see our Image of the Day story