Frontier has claimed the number one spot on the biannual Top500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers for the fifth consecutive time.
However, the system is no longer the only exascale machine on the list, with second place Aurora receiving a HPL (high performance Linpack) benchmark score of 1.012 exaflops. Frontier topped the list with a HPL score of 1.206 exaflops.
Both systems are housed in the US, with Frontier located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and Aurora residing at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility in Illinois.
Frontier is built on HPE Cray EX architecture and uses AMD Epyc 64C 2GHz processors. The system has a total of 8,699,904 combined GPU and CPU cores and uses HPE's Slingshot 11 network for data transfer.
Although it retained its number one spot on the Top500 list, with a rating of 52.927 gigaflops per watt, Frontier did slip in the Green500, a list that ranks supercomputers in terms of energy efficiency, dropping from eighth to 13.
Meanwhile, Aurora, which is still not fully complete, is based on HPE Cray EX- Intel Exascale Computer Blade and uses Intel Xeon CPU Max series processors, Intel Data Center GPU Max Series accelerators, and a Slingshot-11 interconnect. It sits at number 42 on the latest edition of the Green500, with a rating of 26.151 gigaflops per watt.
As per the previous Top500 list, Microsoft’s 561.20 petaflops Eagle supercomputer ranked third, 442.01 petaflops Fugaku came in fourth, and 379.70 petaflops LUMI retained fifth place.
The Eagle system is based on Intel Xeon Platinum 8480C processors and Nvidia H100 accelerators and is installed in the Microsoft Azure Cloud. Fugaku, which is housed at the RIKEN Center for Computational Science in Kobe, Japan, is the highest-ranked system outside of the US. LUMI is another HPE Cray EX system and is installed at EuroHPC center Kajaani, Finland.
The rest of the top ten remains virtually unchanged from the previous list, although the Alps system installed at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) in Switzerland is a new entry at number six, pushing last year’s number ten Sierra – housed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California – down into 12th place.
Alps is an HPE Cray EX254n system that uses an Nvidia Grace 72C processor. It achieved an HPL benchmark score of 270 petaflops.
Places seven through ten were awarded to Leonardo, in Cinceca, Italy; MareNostrum 5 ACC in Barcelona, Spain; Summit, in Tennessee, US; and the Eos Nvidia DGX superpod in the US, respectively.
According to Top500, North America is home to the most machines on the list, claiming 171 out of 500. Meanwhile, Europe has now overtaken Asia for second place, housing 160 systems compared to Asia’s 148.
China, previously a major contributor to the list, operates many powerful supercomputers but rarely submits them for benchmarking in the Top500. It is believed to operate at least two exascale supercomputers.
