TOP500 Expands Exaflops Capacity Amidst Low Turnover
Nov. 16, 2020

FRANKFURT, Germany; BERKELEY, Calif.; and KNOXVILLE, Tenn.—The 56th edition of the TOP500 saw the Japanese Fugaku supercomputer solidify its number one status in a list that reflects a flattening performance growth curve.  Although two new systems managed to make it into the top 10, the full list recorded the smallest number of new entries since the project began in 1993.

The entry level to the list moved up to 1.32 petaflops on the High Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark, a small increase from 1.23 petaflops recorded in the June 2020 rankings. In a similar vein, the aggregate performance of all …

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Red Hat’s Disruption of CentOS Unleashes Storm of Dissent

Five weeks after angering much of the CentOS Linux developer community by unveiling controversial changes to the no-cost CentOS operating system, Red Hat has unveiled alternatives for affected users that give them several options for using existing Red Hat products. But for many users of CentOS Linux, the Red Hat options won’t solve the huge […]

The post Red Hat’s Disruption of CentOS Unleashes Storm of Dissent appeared first on HPCwire.

The Horizontal And Vertical Platforms Of Big Blue

At its heart, and until the day it dies, if a corporation ever really dies, International Business Machines will be a platform company, no matter how much it tries to bamboozle itself or Wall Street or Main Street otherwise. …

The Horizontal And Vertical Platforms Of Big Blue was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

China Unveils First 7nm Chip: Big Island

Shanghai Tianshu Zhaoxin Semiconductor Co. is claiming China’s first 7-nanometer chip, described as a leading-edge, general-purpose cloud computing chip based on a proprietary GPU architecture. Dubbed “Big Island” GPGPU, the datacenter processor is described as a neural network training chip aimed at AI and HPC applications as well as general-purpose computing “at the cloud server […]

The post China Unveils First 7nm Chip: Big Island appeared first on HPCwire.

COVID Modeling Demands Mean Big Storage Boost for IHME

Over the course of the pandemic, you have probably encountered data from IHME, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. …

COVID Modeling Demands Mean Big Storage Boost for IHME was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

Supermicro Unveils Nvidia GPU Server Test Drive Program with Channel Partners

San Jose — Supermicro, an enterprise computing, storage, networking and green computing technology company, released details on a new GPU test-drive program. Called STEP (Supermicro Test drive Engagement with Partners), the program allows customers to remote test drive either Supermicro’s 2U HGX A100 4-GPU or 4U HGX A100 8-GPU system with NVIDIA 3rd Generation NVlink technology. […]

The post Supermicro Unveils Nvidia GPU Server Test Drive Program with Channel Partners appeared first on insideHPC.

Reading the Intel Tea Leaves: Pat Gelsinger’s HPC Paradox

As he takes charge of Intel, CEO Pat Gelsinger faces a paradox: his new company is both troubled and a revenue geyser; if Intel is to continue its historical growth rates, he’ll need the skills of a corporate turnaround artist. These contradictions surely apply to Intel’s position in HPC/AI/data center server processors, where the company […]

The post Reading the Intel Tea Leaves: Pat Gelsinger’s HPC Paradox appeared first on insideHPC.

The List

11/2020 Highlights

After a make-over of the Top10 in June we again see some interesting changes driven by two system upgrades (#1 Fugaku and #5 Selene) and two new systems (#7 JUWELS Booster Module and #10 Dammam-7). The full list however recorded the smallest number of new entries ever since the project started in 1993.

Supercomputer Fugaku, a system based on Fujitsu’s custom ARM A64FX processor remains the new No. 1. It is installed at the RIKEN Center for Computational Science (R-CCS) in Kobe, Japan, the location of the former K-Computer. It was co-developed in close partnership by Riken and Fujitsu and uses Fujitsu’s Tofu D interconnect to transfer data between nodes. It increased in size by about 5% which allowed it to improve its HPL benchmark score to 442 Pflop/s easily exceeding the No. 2 Summit by 3x.

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List Statistics

1 Supercomputer Fugaku - Supercomputer Fugaku, A64FX 48C 2.2GHz, Tofu interconnect D, Fujitsu
2 Summit - IBM Power System AC922, IBM POWER9 22C 3.07GHz, NVIDIA Volta GV100, Dual-rail Mellanox EDR Infiniband, IBM
3 Sierra - IBM Power System AC922, IBM POWER9 22C 3.1GHz, NVIDIA Volta GV100, Dual-rail Mellanox EDR Infiniband, IBM / NVIDIA / Mellanox
4 Sunway TaihuLight - Sunway MPP, Sunway SW26010 260C 1.45GHz, Sunway, NRCPC
5 Selene - NVIDIA DGX A100, AMD EPYC 7742 64C 2.25GHz, NVIDIA A100, Mellanox HDR Infiniband, Nvidia
6 Tianhe-2A - TH-IVB-FEP Cluster, Intel Xeon E5-2692v2 12C 2.2GHz, TH Express-2, Matrix-2000, NUDT
7 JUWELS Booster Module - Bull Sequana XH2000 , AMD EPYC 7402 24C 2.8GHz, NVIDIA A100, Mellanox HDR InfiniBand/ParTec ParaStation ClusterSuite, Atos
8 HPC5 - PowerEdge C4140, Xeon Gold 6252 24C 2.1GHz, NVIDIA Tesla V100, Mellanox HDR Infiniband, Dell EMC
9 Frontera - Dell C6420, Xeon Platinum 8280 28C 2.7GHz, Mellanox InfiniBand HDR, Dell EMC
10 Dammam-7 - Cray CS-Storm, Xeon Gold 6248 20C 2.5GHz, NVIDIA Tesla V100 SXM2, InfiniBand HDR 100, HPE