AMD-powered Frontier system wins first place in Top500 supercomputer rating

The Top500 computing group has as soon as once more named Frontier because the world’s quickest supercomputer.

Frontier is a 9,472-server system put in on the Oak Ridge Nationwide Laboratory. Top500 named it because the world’s quickest high-performance computing system within the newest version of its namesake supercomputer rating, which was revealed on Thursday. The outcomes have been launched in opposition to the backdrop of the Supercomputing 2023 business occasion going down this week in Denver.

Top500 compares supercomputers’ efficiency utilizing a benchmark software referred to as HPL. The software evaluates a machine’s velocity by having it remedy techniques of linear equations after which measuring how briskly it accomplished the duty. Calculations are carried out with numbers saved within the float64 information format, which is used to characterize lengthy fractions.

Frontier first nabbed the primary spot within the Top500 rating final June. On the time, the supercomputer demonstrated efficiency of 1.102 petaflops, which equals about 1.1 million trillion calculations per second. Its velocity has since elevated to 1.194 exaflops.

Frontier includes greater than 9,400 servers deployed in 74 liquid-cooled cupboards. Every server options 5 Superior Micro Units Inc. compute modules: one central processing unit and 4 MI250x accelerators. Every MI250x, in flip, consists of two graphics playing cards.

Frontier is notable not just for setting supercomputing efficiency information but in addition its energy effectivity. The system achieved 1.194 exaflops of efficiency in Top500’s benchmark check utilizing 24.69 megawatts of electrical energy. That’s about two watts lower than the quantity of energy utilized by the second strongest system on the listing, the Argonne Nationwide Laboratory’s not too long ago deployed Aurora system.

The set up of Aurora’s {hardware} elements was accomplished earlier this yr, however it’s not but absolutely operational. The 585.34 petaflops of efficiency the system demonstrated in Top500’s check represents a few quarter of its anticipated compute capability. As soon as all its elements are up and working, Aurora will ship greater than two exaflops of processing energy.

Like Frontier, the present Top500 report holder, Aurora was constructed by Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. However it options processors from Intel Corp. relatively than AMD. Aurora’s 10,000-plus servers home 21,000 CPUs and 60,000 GPUs, about half of which have been operational when the newest Top500 velocity check was performed.

The quantity three spot on the rating is held by a newly detailed Microsoft Corp. supercomputer referred to as Eagle. The system, which is hosted within the firm’s Azure cloud platform, demonstrated a velocity of 561.2 petaflops. It’s powered by Intel CPUs and Nvidia Corp.’s H100 graphics playing cards.

Earlier than Eagle got here on-line, the quantity three spot within the Top500 rating held by a system referred to as Fugaku. Operated by the Riken Middle for Computational Science in Japan, Fugaku is the one top-five supercomputer with CPUs based mostly on Arm plc processor blueprints. The system options no fewer than 158,976 Arm-based processors unfold throughout roughly 400 server racks.

The world’s fifth quickest supercomputer after Frontier, Aurora, Eagle and Aurora is the LUMI system in Kajaani, Finland. It too was constructed by HPE. LUMI is powered by hundreds of 64-core AMD CPUs and GPUs from the chipmaker’s Radeon Intuition graphics card sequence.

The most recent Top500 rating marks a notable milestone for AMD. Some 140 of the five hundred supercomputers within the rating characteristic the chipmaker’s CPUs, which represents a 39% enhance from the identical time a yr earlier. Quickly, yet one more AMD-powered system will be a part of the listing: the U.S. Vitality Division’s upcoming El Capitan supercomputer is anticipated to ship greater than two exaflops of efficiency when it comes on-line subsequent yr.

Picture: HPE