The official rating of the most powerful computing systems on the planet has been conducted since 1992. Although the first supercomputer is considered Cray-1, created in 1976 by Seymour Cray. As a result, the American engineer was nicknamed the “father of supercomputers”, and his company Cray Inc to this day, already under the wing of Hewlett Packard, is one of the leaders in supercomputing. The main measure of performance is the benchmark of dense systems of linear algebraic calculations Linpack. Although since 2017, an alternative benchmark of HPCG sparse matrices has been retested.

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79th and 105th place – Karolina and Athena. Advanced computing systems of Eastern Europe, located in the supercomputer centers of Czech Ostrava and Polish Krakow. The first was built by the tech giant Hewlett-Packard, and the second was built by the relatively small Polish company Format. In addition, Athena is ranked 9th in the Green500 ranking of the most energy efficient supercomputers.

57th and 60th place – Gadi and Dragao. The most powerful supercomputers in the southern hemisphere are found in Australia and Brazil, respectively. The first was created by Lenovo, which does not require any introduction, and the second by the largest European builder of supercomputers Atos (France).

Dammam-7

18th and 74th place – Dammam-7 and Artemis. Top supercomputers of the Middle East, which are owned by private oil company Saudi Aramco (Saudi Arabia) and cloud provider Group 42 (UAE). Designed by HP and NVIDIA respectively. In the alternative benchmark, HPCG takes Dammam-7 a more honorable 8th place. By the way, Saudi Aramco owns four more positions in the TOP500.org supercomputer rating.

23rd place – Piz Daint (read in German as “Piz Daint”). It was launched in support of the Large Hadron Collider by the aforementioned Cray Inc. And after merging with another Swiss supercomputer Piz Dora, for a long time it was the most powerful in Europe.

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12th, 13th and 15th place – HPC5, Voyager-EUS2 and SSC-21. The most productive supercomputers owned not by state scientific institutions, but by private companies. Namely, the Italian oil and gas company Eni SpA, as well as Microsoft and Samsung. The first one was built by Dell engineers, and the second and third ones were built by Microsoft and Samsung. Moreover, Voyager is client-oriented – it provides Azure cloud services.

Voyager-EUS2

9th place – Tianhe-2A (another name for Milkyway-2A). Built by the Chinese company Inspur for the National Supercomputing Center in Guangzhou. In the mid-2010s, it remained the most powerful computing system in the world for two and a half years (usually the leader changes every six months). Based on Intel Xeon E5-2692v2 processors with a total of almost 5 million cores. It is the third most energy-hungry in the world – 18 MW.

6th place – Sunway Taihu Light . Another Chinese computing monster located in the city of Wuxi. Instead of classic CPUs and GPUs, it uses highly specialized Sunway SW26010 RISC processors, each with 260 cores. In total, 10 million cores are obtained, albeit architecturally weaker than x86_64. As a result, Sunway produces 93 PFLOPS in Linpack, while in the alternative HPCG test it only shows 18 results in the world.

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4th and 5th place – Summit and Sierra (149 and 95 PFLOPS). American supercomputer brothers based on 22-core IBM POWER9 processors, which are located in Oak Ridge and Livermore National Laboratories. Used for research in the field of atomic energy and nuclear weapons. In addition to the CPU, NVIDIA Volta GV100 video cards are used. In the HPCG test, Summit takes a higher 2nd place.

3rd place – LUMI (shown in the first picture of the article, with a wolf, 152 PFLOPS). Finland is famous not only for the fastest racing drivers, but also for the fastest supercomputer in Europe. In both benchmarks – Linpack and HPCG – LUMI takes the same 3rd place. By the way, there are two more TOP500 supercomputers in Finland, named Mahti and Puhti.

Fugaku supercomputer

2nd place – Supercomputer Fugaku. Last year’s Linpack Champion (442 PFLOPS) hails from Japan and still holds the lead in the HPCG test. All thanks to the bet on central processors, instead of video cards – Fujitsu A64FX with 48 cores of the SPARC64 V architecture. Yes, and its energy appetite is champion – almost 30 MW.

1st place – Frontier. Apparently, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Summit supercomputer turned out to be too small – and HP built a new monster for them with a power of 1.1 EFLOPS (1100 PFLOPS). It was possible to break out so far ahead thanks to 64-core AMD EPYC 3rd Gen processors and AMD Instinct MI250X graphics cards. Power consumption was 21 MW, which is the second best result in terms of productivity. Only the little brother of the Frontier TDS is more environmentally friendly (29th place in Linpack).

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Frontier

Endless Race

If we count in pieces, then more than a third of the supercomputers from the TOP500 list are located in China. But in terms of total computing power, the United States leads – almost half. In third place is Japan with a share of 7% in pieces, and 14% in capacities. It is followed by Germany, France, Canada and the UK. A billion-strong India has only three supercomputers at its disposal, while a half-million-strong Luxembourg has two. The Moroccan Toubkal is considered the African champion (162nd in the global ranking). And according to rumors, China has already completed the construction of two exascale systems – Sunway Oceanlite and Tianhe-3, but so far keeps the results of benchmarks a secret. And which supercomputer visually or according to the description did you like the most?