Fugaku Holds Top Spot, Exascale Remains Elusive
June 28, 2021

FRANKFURT, Germany; BERKELEY, Calif.; and KNOXVILLE, Tenn.— The 57 th edition of the TOP500 saw little change in the Top10. The only new entry in the Top10 is the Perlmutter system at NERSC at the DOE Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The machine is based on the HPE Cray "Shasta" platform and a heterogeneous system with both GPU-accelerated and CPU-only nodes. Perlmutter achieved 64.6 Pflop/s, putting the supercomputer at No. 5 in the new list.

TOP500 News

GREEN500: Trend of steady progress with no big step toward newer technologies.
June 28, 2021

Although there was a trend of steady progress in the Green500, nothing has indicated a big step toward newer technologies.

The system to snag the No. 1 spot for the Green500 was MN-3 from Preferred Networks in Japan. Knocked from the top of the last list by NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD in the US, MN-3 is back to reclaim its crown. This system relies on the MN-Core chip, an accelerator optimized for matrix arithmetic, as well as a Xeon Platinum 8260M processor. MN-3 achieved a 29.70 gigaflops/watt power-efficiency and has a TOP500 ranking of 337.

News Feed

Adaptive HPC Cluster Optimizes Next-Generation DNA Sequencing Workloads

Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) is an important tool in predictive medicine and genomic analysis. NGS is a form of DNA sequencing that analyzes individual strands of DNA simultaneously, to analyze DNA at a much faster rate than other methods. This paper describes how solutions by Quanta Cloud Technology (QCT), Qumulo and Intel provide pre-validated custom hardware and management tools for use […]

The post Adaptive HPC Cluster Optimizes Next-Generation DNA Sequencing Workloads appeared first on HPCwire.

Graphcore Introduces Larger-Than-Ever IPU-Based Pods

Graphcore and its “Intelligent Processing Units” (IPUs) emerged from stealth in 2016 and launched its second-generation IPU in 2020. While the company has also launched its IPUs in a variety of form factors over the ensuing years, it’s just announced its largest-ever commercially available IPU-based systems: the IPU-POD128 and the IPU-POD256. Graphcore’s GC200 IPUs, which […]

The post Graphcore Introduces Larger-Than-Ever IPU-Based Pods appeared first on HPCwire.

LLNL Joins Human Vaccines Project

Oct. 21, 2021 — Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) has joined the international Human Vaccines Project (HVP), bringing lab research and computing resources to the consortium to aid development of a universal coronavirus vaccine and improve understanding of immune response. The HVP is a nonprofit, public-private partnership with a mission to decode the human immune system […]

The post LLNL Joins Human Vaccines Project appeared first on insideHPC.

Overcoming Bandwidth and Capacity Bottlenecks in the Exascale Era

[SPONSORED POST] Join us for the Advanced Memory Architectures to Overcome Bandwidth Bottlenecks for the Exascale Era of Computing webinar on November 10 at 9:00 am PT. During this webinar, leading industry experts will discuss the future of advanced memory architectures, new optical I/O solutions using silicon photonics, and the technologies and environments needed to make next-generation performance a reality.

The post Overcoming Bandwidth and Capacity Bottlenecks in the Exascale Era appeared first on insideHPC.

Micron Urges Government Investment with R&D Spend

Over the last twenty years, memory has risen from ten percent of the semiconductor market to almost 30 percent — a trend that is expected to continue, propelled by compute at the edge all the way up to datacenter. …

Micron Urges Government Investment with R&D Spend was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

How High-Bandwidth Memory Will Break Performance Bottlenecks

Intel recently announced that High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM) will be available on select “Sapphire Rapids” Xeon SP processors and will provide the CPU backbone for the “Aurora” exascale supercomputer to be sited at Argonne National Laboratory. …

How High-Bandwidth Memory Will Break Performance Bottlenecks was written by Rob Farber at The Next Platform.

Sponsored Article

PRACE Software Strategy for European Exascale Systems
Sept. 1, 2021

Building on the successful implementation of the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE), the European Commission (EC) has increased its efforts to develop a world-class supercomputing ecosystem in Europe. The EC, EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (JU) and EU Member States have made significant investments in European petascale and pre-exascale infrastructure, have put exascale supercomputers on the roadmap, and are actively exploring new post-exascale architectures. The return on investment will be directly linked to the productivity of end-users in academia, in industry, and in the public sector. Key to this productivity is an ecosystem of user-oriented software: scientific applications and workflows …

The List

06/2021 Highlights

The only new entry in the Top10 is the Perlmutter system at NERSC at the DOE Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. It is based on the HPE Cray “Shasta” platform and a heterogeneous system with both GPU-accelerated and CPU-only nodes. Perlmutter achieved 64.6 Pflop/s which put it at No. 5 in the new list.

Supercomputer Fugaku, a system based on Fujitsu’s custom ARM A64FX processor remains 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. Its HPL benchmark score to 442 Pflop/s easily exceeding the No. 2 Summit by 3x. In single or further reduced precision, which are often used in machine learning and AI applications, it’s peak performance is actually above 1,000 PFlop/s (= 1 Exaflop/s) and because of this, it is often introduced as the first ‘Exascale’ supercomputer. Fugaku actually already demonstrated this new level of performance on the new HPL-AI benchmark with 2 Exaflops! https://www.r-ccs.riken.jp/en/

read more »

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 Perlmutter - HPE Cray EX235n, AMD EPYC 7763 64C 2.45GHz, NVIDIA A100 SXM4 40 GB, Slingshot-10, HPE
6 Selene - NVIDIA DGX A100, AMD EPYC 7742 64C 2.25GHz, NVIDIA A100, Mellanox HDR Infiniband, Nvidia
7 Tianhe-2A - TH-IVB-FEP Cluster, Intel Xeon E5-2692v2 12C 2.2GHz, TH Express-2, Matrix-2000, NUDT
8 JUWELS Booster Module - Bull Sequana XH2000 , AMD EPYC 7402 24C 2.8GHz, NVIDIA A100, Mellanox HDR InfiniBand/ParTec ParaStation ClusterSuite, Atos
9 HPC5 - PowerEdge C4140, Xeon Gold 6252 24C 2.1GHz, NVIDIA Tesla V100, Mellanox HDR Infiniband, Dell EMC
10 Frontera - Dell C6420, Xeon Platinum 8280 28C 2.7GHz, Mellanox InfiniBand HDR, Dell EMC