Top500 List Shows AMD Leading With 121 Supercomputers In Its Bag, 168 Powered By NVIDIA GPUs

USA Plans To Produce The Fastest Supercomputer Called Discovery, Surpassing The Frontier By 3-5 Times 1

Top500 just released its June 2023 statistics for the top supercomputers in the world powered by AMD, NVIDIA & Intel chips.

As per the latest figures, it looks like NVIDIA GPUs are powering the bulk of the supercomputers in the Top500 list with a total of 168 systems while AMD's CPUs and GPUs power a total of 121 super computers. At the same time, Supercomputers housing AMD and NVIDIA GPU-based accelerators are largely running Intel CPUs which cover around 400 supercomputers and that's a huge figure & while the number of systems running Intel CPUs are in a clear lead in quantity, AMD actually wins the crown for the fastest supercomputer around in the form of Frontier.

AMD bagged a total of 4 of the top 10 supercomputers in the world while NVIDIA bagged 5 and Intel only managed to bag one win with the Tianhe-2A. The Green500 list was slightly different as AMD led with 7 out of 10 wins, NVIDIA at 3, and Intel with just one though that was also the most efficient combined with NVIDIA's H100 GPUs (Henri / US).

Press Release: Increasing its HPL score from 1.02 Eflop/s in November 2022 to an impressive 1.194 Eflop/s on this list, Frontier was able to improve upon its score after a stagnation between June 2022 and November 2022. Considering exascale was only a goal to aspire to just a few years ago, a roughly 17% increase here is an enormous success. Additionally, Frontier earned a score of 9.95 Eflop/s on the HLP-MxP benchmark, which measures performance for mixed-precision calculation.

This is also an increase over the 7.94 EFlop/s that the system achieved on the previous list and is nearly 10 times more powerful than the machine’s HPL score. Frontier is based on the HPE Cray EX235a architecture and utilizes AMD EPYC 64C 2GHz processors. It also has 8,699,904 cores and an incredible energy efficiency rating of 52.59 Gflops/watt. It also relies on gigabit ethernet for data transfer.

The Fugaku system at the Riken Center for Computational Science (R-CCS) in Kobe, Japan, also remained at the No. 2 spot that it earned on the previous list. The system held steady at its previous HPL score of 0.442 Eflop/s.

The LUMI system at EuroHPC/CSC in Finland entered the list in June 2022 at No. 3. It is listed as No. 3 after an upgrade of the system last November and has an HPL score of 0.3091 Eflop/s. With this, it remains the largest system in Europe.

The Leonardo system at EuroHPC/CINECA in Bologna, Italy, remains at the No. 4 spot. It also saw upgrades that allowed it to improve upon its score, achieving an HPL score of 0.239 Eflop/s in comparison to its previous score of 0.174 EFlop/s.

Here is a summary of the system in the Top 10:

Frontier is the No. 1 system in the TOP500. This HPE Cray EX system is the first US system with a performance exceeding one Exaflop/s. It is installed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee, USA, where it is operated by the Department of Energy (DOE). It currently has achieved 1.194 Eflop/s using 8,699,904 cores. The HPE Cray EX architecture combines 3rd Gen AMD EPYC™ CPUs optimized for HPC and AI, with AMD Instinct™ 250X accelerators, and Slingshot-10 interconnect.

Fugaku, 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.

The LUMI system, another HPE Cray EX system installed at EuroHPC center at CSC in Finland is the No. 3 with a performance of 0.3091 Eflop/s. 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 located in CSC’s data center in Kajaani, Finland.

The No. 4 system Leonardo is installed at a different EuroHPC site in CINECA, Italy. It is an Atos BullSequana XH2000 system with Xeon Platinum 8358 32C 2.6GHz as main processors, NVIDIA A100 SXM4 40 GB as accelerators, and Quad-rail NVIDIA HDR100 Infiniband as interconnect. It achieved a Linpack performance of 238.7 Pflop/s.

Summit, an IBM-built system at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee, USA, is again listed at the No. 5 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 one housing two POWER9 CPUs with 22 cores each 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. 6. Its architecture is very similar to the #5 system’s Summit. It is built with 4,320 nodes with two POWER9 CPUs and four NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs. Sierra achieved 94.6 Pflop/s.

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, which is in China's Jiangsu province is listed at the No. 7 position with 93 Pflop/s.

Perlmutter at No. 8 is based on the HPE Cray “Shasta” platform and a heterogeneous system with AMD EPYC-based nodes and 1,536 NVIDIA A100 accelerated nodes. Perlmutter achieved 64.6 Pflop/s

Selene now at No. 9 is an NVIDIA DGX A100 SuperPOD installed inhouse at NVIDIA in the USA. The system is based on AMD EPYC processor with NVIDIA A100 for acceleration and a Mellanox HDR InfiniBand as network and achieved 63.4 Pflop/s.

Tianhe-2A (Milky Way-2A), a system developed by China’s National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) and deployed at the National Supercomputer Center in Guangzhou, China is now listed as the No. 10 system with 61.4 Pflop/s.

The TOP500 list shows that AMD, Intel, and IBM processors are the preferred choice for HPC systems. Out of the TOP10, four systems use AMD processors (Frontier, LUMI, Perlmutter, and Selene), two use Intel processors (Leonardo and Tianhe-2A), and two use IBM processors (Summit and Sierra.)

Much like the previous list, China and the United States earned most of the entries on the entire TOP500 list. The United States increased its lead from 126 machines on the last list to 150 on the current list, while China dropped from 162 systems to 134. In terms of entire continents, Asia as a whole saw 192 machines on the list, North America added 160 systems, and Europe offered 133 systems.

In terms of system interconnects, ethernet was still the clear winner despite dropping from 233 machines to 227. Infiniband interconnects increased their presence on the list from 194 machines to 200, and Omnipath dropped from 36 machines to 35. Custom interconnects saw a massive increase from 4 systems to 31.

The No. 1 spot on the GREEN500 was again earned by the Henri system at the Flatiron Institute in New York City, United States, with an energy efficiency of 65.40 Gflops/Watt. What’s more, improvements to the system allowed it to achieve an impressive jump on the TOP500 list from the No. 405 spot to No. 255 with a current HPL score of 2.88 Pflop/s – an increase over the last list’s score of 2.038 Pflop/s. Henri has 8,288 and is a Lenovo ThinkSystem SR670 with Intel Xeon Platinum and Nvidia H100.

The No. 2 spot was achieved by the Frontier Test & Development System (TDS) at ORNL in the United States with an energy efficiency rating of 62.20 Gflops/Watt. The Frontier TDS system is simply a single rack identical to the actual Frontier system and has an HPL score of 19.2 Pflop/s.

The No. 3 spot was taken by the Adastra system. An HPE Cray EX235a system with AMD EPYC and AMD Instinct MI250X. Additionally, the actual Frontier system deserves an honorable mention in terms of its energy efficiency. Despite its No.1 spot on the TOP500 list with an HPL score of 1.194 Eflop/s, this machine was still able to achieve a No. 6 spot on the GREEN500 with an energy efficiency rating of 52.59 Gflops/Watt.