Nvidia, Intel chips continue to dominate the HPC landscape
Supercomputers are getting faster
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
The majority of world’ssupercomputerscontinue to run onIntelprocessors and make use ofNvidiaGPU accelerators, according to the latest bi-annualTop500rankings.
The rankings reveal that, with a share of 86.2%,Intelcontinues to be the dominant processor provider of the top 500 systems, with Skylake accounting for 35.2%, followed by Broadwell at 24.4%, and Cascade Lake at 16.8%.
Furthermore, a total of 145 systems on the list are using accelerator/co-processor technology, with 96 of these relying onNvidiaVolta chips, while 26 useNvidia Ampere, and nine run Nvidia Pascal.
Top500 notes that supercomputers are getting faster, with the entry point for the top 100 rising to 4.13 Petaflop/s. In fact, the last placed system on the current list was 49 places up at position 451 in the previous top 500 ranking.
More of the same
There isn’t much change in the list of top ten supercomputers, withFugaku, powered by Fujitsu’s customArmA64FX processor, retaining the top spot with three-times the performance of IBM Summit at number two.
The top ten does get a new entrant in the form of thePerlmutter supercomputerdesigned by China’s National Research Center of Parallel Computer Engineering & Technology (NRCPC).
Installed at the Department of Energy at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the US, Perlmutter is based on the HPE Cray “Shasta” platform. The supercomputer is a heterogeneous system with bothNvidia A100-poweredGPU-accelerated andAMDEPYC-based CPU-only nodes.
Are you a pro? Subscribe to our newsletter
Sign up to the TechRadar Pro newsletter to get all the top news, opinion, features and guidance your business needs to succeed!
Also of note is the fact that, while Intel’s 86.2% share of the top 500 has come down from 91.8% six months ago, AMD has increased its share from 4.2% to 9.8% in the same period.
Overall, AMD powers a total of 49 supercomputers, of which 43 use AMD Rome. Also, while three of the top 10 supercomputers use AMD, the majority of the Green 500 energy-efficient supercomputers are powered by the company’s chips.
With almost two decades of writing and reporting on Linux, Mayank Sharma would like everyone to think he’sTechRadar Pro’sexpert on the topic. Of course, he’s just as interested in other computing topics, particularly cybersecurity, cloud, containers, and coding.
New fanless cooling technology enhances energy efficiency for AI workloads by achieving a 90% reduction in cooling power consumption
Samsung plans record-breaking 400-layer NAND chip that could be key to breaking 200TB barrier for ultra large capacity AI hyperscaler SSDs
NYT Strands today — hints, answers and spangram for Sunday, November 10 (game #252)
