Supercomputing modified within the late 90s. It was once that the most important and quickest computer systems had been all fully customized jobs, with proprietary all the things and unique {hardware} operating esoteric architectures. Within the late-90s, somebody discovered that you could possibly obtain supercomputer efficiency on some duties just by wiring collectively a big cluster of off-the-shelf PCs. Ever since then, many of the world’s quickest supercomputers have basically been overgrown commodity servers, typically with customized interlinks or different peculiarities.
So it goes with the most recent machine to high the Top500 record. For these unfamiliar, Top500 is a listing of the highest five-hundred quickest supercomputers on the planet—or at the very least, those who submit their outcomes to be ranked, anyway. Probably the most-recent Top500 record simply got here out, and resting atop the pile is the brand-new Frontier system, owned and operated by the USA’s Oak Ridge Nationwide Laboratory.
Regardless of the big dimension of the machine, its unbelievable efficiency implies that it’s truly not simply the quickest, but in addition probably the most environment friendly: Frontier topped the Green500 record, too. Every cupboard of the machine delivers 62.68 GFLOPs of compute per watt consumed, though while you take note of all the networking required for the total system its effectivity drops to “simply” 52 GFLOPS/watt—nonetheless excessive sufficient to take the highest spot.
HPE Cray’s new AMD-powered machine knocked Japan’s Fugaku system off the #1 spot. That machine is powered by ARM A64X processors, and it too has a peak theoretical efficiency over 1 EFLOP, nevertheless it hasn’t been capable of notice that efficiency on the Linpack benchmark that Top500 makes use of. It is held the highest spot for 2 years with “simply” 442 PFLOPs, or slightly below half of what Frontier is able to.
For example how far forward Fugaku and Frontier are from the remainder of the record, a really comparable system to Frontier—additionally constructed by HPE Cray and utilizing the identical primary AMD elements—slotted in freshly at place #3. That system is known as LUMI, and it lives in Finland, the place it produces 152 PFLOPs for that nation’s IT Middle for Science, often called CSC.
In reality, AMD proudly notes in its press launch that it lays declare to 94 methods out of the Top500 record, which does not sound that spectacular on the face of it, however that quantity has almost doubled since final 12 months. The corporate additionally gloats that it dominates the Green500 record, holding the highest 4 positions, eight of the highest ten, and 17 of the highest 20.
A cynic would possibly level out that that is just because the AMD methods are additionally the most recent methods, and that future machines utilizing Intel, NVIDIA, IBM, or ARM {hardware} would possibly equally leapfrog the pink group’s tools. That is probably sooner or later, although, and never a assured. As such, let’s let AMD have a good time a bit, as a result of they’ve earned it.
