The Top 500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers was recently released, and AMD maintains the top spot on the list with the Frontier supercomputer, while the test and development system based on the same architecture maintains the second spot in power efficiency metrics on the Green 500 list. AMD also powers seven of the top 10 Green 500 systems.
After years of delays, the AMD-powered Frontier remains the only fully-qualified exascale-class supercomputer on the planet, while the Intel-powered two-exaflop Aurora has yet to submit a benchmark result. Frontier, on the other hand, is already fully operational and is being used by academics across a wide range of scientific workloads.
Indeed, Frontier continues to improve as a result of tuning – the system entered the Top 500 list in June 2022 with 1.02 exaflops of performance but has since increased to 1.194 exaflops, a 17% improvement. That’s a significant increase from the original 8,699,904 CPU cores. To put this in context, the extra 92 petaflops of performance from tweaking is equivalent to the entire Perlmutter system, which ranks seventh on the Top 500.
Intel’s CPUs continue to dominate the ranking, with more computers on the Top 500 than AMD.
However, AMD’s market share is growing, with AMD hardware powering 21 of the 44 new computers added to the list in the last year. To put things in context, AMD CPUs powered 13 supercomputers on the list in 2016, but have now risen to 121, thanks partly to its newer EPYC processors. Meanwhile, Intel has reduced its server count from 454 in 2016 to 360 now, with many of those powered by Xeon chips dating back nearly a decade.
Frontier also leads the globe in the HLP-MxP benchmark, which measures HPC and AI performance in mixed-precision workloads, with 9.95 exaflops. Meanwhile, the LUMI supercomputer powered by AMD comes in second with 2.2 exaflops.
Frontier also finished second in the HPCG benchmark, which is more concerned with system-level performance than Linpack, with 14.05 HPCG-Pflops. The AMD-powered LUMI came in second with 3.41 HPCG-Pflops, while Fugaku maintained its lead with 16 HPCG-Pflops.
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