El Capitan achieves top spot, Frontier and Aurora follow behind
Nov. 18, 2024

The 64th edition of the TOP500 reveals that El Capitan has achieved the top spot and is officially the third system to reach exascale computing after Frontier and Aurora. Both systems have since moved down to No. 2 and No. 3 spots, respectively. Additionally, new systems have found their way onto the Top 10.


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The Influence of HPC-ers: Setting the Standard for What’s “Cool”
Jan. 16, 2025

A look back to supercomputing at the turn of the century

When I first attended the Supercomputing (SC) conferences back in the early 2000s as an IBMer working in High Performance Computing (HPC), it was obvious this conference was intended for serious computer science researchers and industries singularly focused on pushing the boundaries of computing. Linux was still in its infancy. I vividly remember having to re-compile kernels with newly released drivers every time there was a new server that came to market just so I could get the system to PXE boot over the network. But there was one …


The Evolution, Convergence and Cooling of AI & HPC Gear
Nov. 7, 2024

Years ago, when Artificial Intelligence (AI) began to emerge as a potential technology to be harnessed as a powerful tool to change the way the world works, organizations began to kick the AI tires by exploring it’s potential to enhance their research or business. However, to get started with AI, neural networks needed to be created, data sets trained, and microprocessors were needed that could perform matrix-multiplication calculations ideally suited to perform these computationally demanding tasks. Enter the accelerator.


News Feed

HPC News Bytes 20250421: Chips and Geopolitical Chess, Intel and FPGAs, Cool Storage, 2nm CPUs in Taiwan and Arizona

Good April morning to you! It's been an active week in the world of HPC-AI, here’s a quick (8:43) rundown of recent industry news: Nvidia, AMD and China export rules, Intel sells part of FPGA business, storage investments soar, 2nm coming to Taiwan and Arizona

The post HPC News Bytes 20250421: Chips and Geopolitical Chess, Intel and FPGAs, Cool Storage, 2nm CPUs in Taiwan and Arizona appeared first on High-Performance Computing News Analysis | insideHPC.

TSMC: The Second Most Profitable Company In The AI Revolution

The AI boom has been very, very good to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co, which is positioned to do well if Nvidia continues with its hegemony over AI training and inference or if the rebel alliance forms behind AMD or if the hyperscalers and cloud builders dedicate a substantial portion of their capital budgets to etching and packaging homegrown compute engines.

TSMC: The Second Most Profitable Company In The AI Revolution was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Deloitte Reports on Nuclear Power and the HPC-AI Data Center Energy Gap

Even as the HPC-AI sector cheers on more powerful chips, denser servers, faster fabrics, bigger memory and mammoth, multi-hundreds of billion-dollar AI data centers, a voice is whispering in the industry’s ear: “Where’s the electricity for all this?” Good point! It’s generally assumed the data center energy gap will be filled by some combination of […]

The post Deloitte Reports on Nuclear Power and the HPC-AI Data Center Energy Gap appeared first on High-Performance Computing News Analysis | insideHPC.

Stacking Up Google’s “Ironwood” TPU Pod To Other AI Supercomputers

As part of the pre-briefings ahead of the Google Cloud Next 2025 conference last week and then during the keynote address, the top brass at Google kept comparing a pod of “Ironwood” TPU v7p systems to the “El Capitan” supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Stacking Up Google’s “Ironwood” TPU Pod To Other AI Supercomputers was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

TOP500 News

The Influence of HPC-ers: Setting the Standard for What’s “Cool”
Jan. 16, 2025

A look back to supercomputing at the turn of the century

When I first attended the Supercomputing (SC) conferences back in the early 2000s as an IBMer working in High Performance Computing (HPC), it was obvious this conference was intended for serious computer science researchers and industries singularly focused on pushing the boundaries of computing. Linux was still in its infancy. I vividly remember having to re-compile kernels with newly released drivers every time there was a new server that came to market just so I could get the system to PXE boot over the network. But there was one …


El Capitan achieves top spot, Frontier and Aurora follow behind
Nov. 18, 2024

The 64th edition of the TOP500 reveals that El Capitan has achieved the top spot and is officially the third system to reach exascale computing after Frontier and Aurora. Both systems have since moved down to No. 2 and No. 3 spots, respectively. Additionally, new systems have found their way onto the Top 10.


The Evolution, Convergence and Cooling of AI & HPC Gear
Nov. 7, 2024

Years ago, when Artificial Intelligence (AI) began to emerge as a potential technology to be harnessed as a powerful tool to change the way the world works, organizations began to kick the AI tires by exploring it’s potential to enhance their research or business. However, to get started with AI, neural networks needed to be created, data sets trained, and microprocessors were needed that could perform matrix-multiplication calculations ideally suited to perform these computationally demanding tasks. Enter the accelerator.


The List

11/2024 Highlights

The 64th edition of the TOP500 reveals that El Capitan has achieved the top spot and is officially the third system to reach exascale computing after Frontier and Aurora. Both systems have since moved down to No. 2 and No. 3 spots, respectively. Additionally, new systems have found their way onto the Top 10.

The new El Capitan system at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, U.S.A., has debuted as the most powerful system on the list with an HPL score of 1.742 EFlop/s. It has 11,039,616 combined CPU and GPU cores and is based on AMD 4th generation EPYC processors with 24 cores at 1.8GHz and AMD Instinct MI300A accelerators. El Capitan relies on a Cray Slingshot 11 network for data transfer and achieves an energy efficiency of 58.89 Gigaflops/watt. This power efficiency rating helped El Capitan achieve No. 18 on the GREEN500 list as well.

The Frontier system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, U.S.A, has moved down to the No. 2 spot. It has increased its HPL score from 1.206 Eflop/s on the last list to 1.353 Eflop/s on this list. Frontier has also increased its total core count, from 8,699,904 cores on the last list to 9,066,176 cores on this list. It relies on Cray’s Slingshot 11 network for data transfer.

The Aurora system at Argonne Leadership Computing Facility in Illinois, U.S.A, has claimed the No. 3 spot on this TOP500 list. The machine kept its HPL benchmark score from the last list, achieving 1.012 Exaflop/s. Aurora is built by Intel based on the HPE Cray EX – Intel Exascale Compute blade which uses Intel Xeon CPU Max Series Processors and Intel Data Center GPU Max Series accelerators that communicate through Cray’s Slingshot-11 network interconnect.

The Eagle system installed on the Microsoft Azure Cloud in the U.S.A. claimed the No. 4 spot and remains the highest-ranked cloud-based system on the TOP500. It has an HPL score of 561.2 PFlop/s

The only other new system in the TOP 5 is the HPC6 system at No. 5. This machine is installed at Eni S.p.A center in Ferrera Erbognone, Italy and has the same architecture as the No. 2 system Frontier. The HPC6 system at Eni achieved an HPL benchmark of 477.90 PFlop/s and is now the fastest system in Europe.

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