The world ranking "TOP 500" for supercomputer computational speed has been announced, with "El Capitan" from the US Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) keeping the top spot from last November, achieving consecutive championships. Together with "Frontier," which had won five consecutive championships before yielding first place to El Capitan, there are 3 "exascale" supercomputers in the tally, meaning they are capable of 1 quintillion (1018) calculations per second, continuing from the previous ranking. RIKEN's "Fugaku" dropped from 6th to 7th place. RIKEN plans to begin operation of a successor machine around 2030.
Provided by US Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
TOP500 is a biannual competition of processing speeds for performance evaluation programs. In the latest version announced on the 10th Japan time at an international conference held in Hamburg, Germany, El Capitan, developed by the US Department of Energy, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, AMD, and others, achieved 1,742 petaflops per second. The top three spots were taken by US systems, followed by one German system. Fugaku, in 7th place, has a speed of 442.01 petaflops per second.
El Capitan is used by three laboratories of the National Nuclear Security Administration. It helps verify the reliability of stockpiled nuclear weapons without conducting nuclear tests, contributing to ensuring US nuclear deterrence. It is also used for physics research. The LLNL also introduced "Tuolumne," a smaller version of El Capitan for widespread use in less classified research, which ranked 12th.
The breakdown of the top 500 systems shows the US with the most at 175 systems. This was followed by China with 47, Germany with 41, Japan with 39, and France with 25. Meanwhile, China has had no new entries in recent years and appears to have turned passive regarding participation in TOP500. While exact performance is unknown, it is said to have already developed two or more exascale supercomputers.
Japan was overtaken by China and the US after its predecessor "K" won consecutive championships in 2011. In June 2020, Fugaku returned to first place for the first time in 8.5 years and achieved four consecutive championships until November 2021.
Provided by RIKEN
In "Graph 500," which ranks systems by their graph analysis performance and was announced simultaneously with TOP500, Fugaku achieved 1st place for 11 consecutive periods. It also ranked 2nd in "HPCG," which ranks systems by computational speed suitable for industrial use, showing its strength in practicality.
Fugaku was jointly developed by RIKEN and Fujitsu and installed at the site of the RIKEN Center for Computational Science (Kobe City) where its predecessor "K" used to be placed. After trial use starting in April 2020, it began full operation in March 2021, with usage by industry, academia, and government progressing. RIKEN announced the start of the development of Fugaku's successor in January this year. Its codename is "Fugaku NEXT," and it is planned to become operational around 2030. In addition to increasing effective performance in simulations by 5-10 times, it aims for the world-class performance needed for AI (artificial intelligence), whose utilization is rapidly advancing. At the end of March, it was decided to install Fugaku NEXT at a site adjacent to the Center. This is because removing and replacing Fugaku would create a long period of non-use. Also, on the 18th of this month, it was announced that Fujitsu was selected as the implementer of basic design work related to the overall system.
The top rankings of TOP500 are as follows (name, host organization, country, computational speed per second).
- 1st place: El Capitan, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (USA), 1,742 petaflops
- 2nd place: Frontier, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (USA), 1,353 petaflops
- 3rd place: Aurora, Argonne National Laboratory (USA), 1,012 petaflops
- 4th place: JUPITER Booster, Jülich Research Centre (Germany), 793.4 petaflops
- 5th place: Eagle, Microsoft Corporation (USA), 561.2 petaflops
Original article was provided by the Science Portal and has been translated by Science Japan.