The TOP500, a global ranking of supercomputer computational speed, has been announced. "El Capitan" at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in the United States has retained the top position following the June edition, achieving three consecutive top rankings. With the addition of a newly completed German system, there are now four "exascale-class" supercomputers on the list, each capable of performing 1 quintillion (1018) calculations per second. RIKEN's "Fugaku" maintained its 7th place ranking, with plans to have a successor machine operational around 2030.
Provided by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
TOP500 is a biannual list that measures processing speed using performance evaluation programs. The latest version, announced on November 18 (Japan Standard Time) at an international conference held in St. Louis, Missouri, El Capitan — developed by the U.S. Department of Energy, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, AMD, and others — achieved 1.809 Exaflop/s (1.809 quintillion calculations per second). U.S. systems occupied the top three positions, followed by Germany's "JUPITER Booster," which reached 1 Exaflop/s upon completion. Fugaku, ranked 7th, achieved a speed of 442.01 Petaflop/s.
El Capitan is used by three laboratories under the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). It will contribute to maintaining U.S. nuclear deterrence by helping verify the reliability of the stockpiled nuclear arsenal without conducting nuclear tests. It is also used for physics research. LLNL has also introduced "Tuolumne," a smaller version of El Capitan for broader use in less classified research, which ranked 12th.
Among the top 500 systems, the United States had the most with 172 computers. Japan followed with 43 systems, rising to 2nd from 4th place in the previous edition's rankings. Germany had 40, China 39, and France 22. Meanwhile, China has recently adopted a passive stance toward TOP500 participation and is said to have already developed multiple exascale-class supercomputers.
Japan was overtaken by China and the United States after its predecessor "K computer" achieved consecutive top rankings in 2011. In June 2020, Japan reclaimed the top spot with Fugaku for the first time in eight and a half years, achieving four consecutive top rankings until November 2021. In the "High Performance Conjugate Gradients (HPCG)" benchmark, which measures computational speed suitable for industrial applications and was announced simultaneously with TOP500, Japan ranked 2nd, demonstrating its strength in practical applications. Japan also ranked 2nd in the subsequently announced "Graph500," which evaluates graph analysis performance.
Provided by RIKEN
Fugaku was jointly developed by RIKEN and Fujitsu and installed at the former site of the K computer at the RIKEN Center for Computational Science located in Kobe City. After trial use beginning in April 2020, it became fully operational in March 2021, and its usage by industry, academia, and government continues to advance.
In January of this year, RIKEN announced the start of the development of Fugaku's successor. Code-named "Fugaku NEXT," it is planned to become operational around 2030. In addition to increasing effective simulation performance by 5 to 10 times, it aims to achieve world-leading performance for AI (artificial intelligence), with its utilization rapidly advancing. At the end of March, it was decided to install Fugaku NEXT on land adjacent to the RIKEN Center. This is because replacing Fugaku by removing it would result in a long gap in availability. In June, it was announced that Fujitsu had been selected as the contractor for the basic design work related to the overall system.
The top rankings in TOP500 are as follows (name, hosting organization, country, calculations per second):
- 1st: El Capitan — Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (United States of America) — 1.809 Exaflop/s
- 2nd: Frontier — Oak Ridge National Laboratory (United States of America) — 1.353 Exaflop/s
- 3rd: Aurora — Argonne National Laboratory (United States of America) — 1.012 Exaflop/s
- 4th: JUPITER Booster — Forschungszentrum Jülich (Germany) — 1.0 Exaflop/s
- 5th: Eagle — Microsoft (United States of America) — 561.2 Petaflop/s
Original article was provided by the Science Portal and has been translated by Science Japan.