Japan’s Fugaku’s supercomputer bests US’ Summit system by 2.8 times
By Amit Chettupuzha
DUBAI: Japan’s Fugaku’s supercomputer has bested US’ Summit system by a factor of 2.8 times in the latest Top500 list.
It is powered by Fujitsu’s 48-core A64FX SoC, thus becoming the first number one system on the list to be powered by ARM processors.
Fugaku, an alternative name for Mount Fuji and installed at Riken Centre for Computational Science (R-CCS) in Kobe, Japan, turned in a High Performance Linpack (HPL) result of 415.5 petaflops, compared to Summit, an IBM-built supercomputer, that delivered 148.8 petaflops.
It has chosen Oracle Cloud as the public cloud provider for its elastic HPC storage and to enable universities and research organisations to connect securely and at low cost through Science Information Network (SINET).
Summit, equipped with two 22-core Power9 CPUs and six NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs, is running at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee and remains the fastest supercomputer in the US.
Sierra, ranked at number three and equipped with two Power9 CPUs and four NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs, is running at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California, achieved 94.6 petaflops.
Sunway TaihuLight, developed by China’s National Research Center of Parallel Computer Engineering & Technology (NRCPC) and installed at the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi, China drops to number four on the list with a mark of 93 petaflops.
Tianhe-2A (Milky Way-2A), a system developed by China’s National University of Defence Technology (NUDT) and deployed at the National Supercomputer Center in Guangzhou, China, has an HPL performance of 61.4 petaflops.
Overall, the number of new systems in the list is only 51, a record low since the beginning of the Top500 in 1993.
The Top500 list is compiled by Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville; and Martin Meuer of ISC Group, Germany.
The x86 continues to be the dominant processor architecture, being present in 481 of the 500 systems.
Intel claims 469 of these, with AMD installed in 11 and Hygon in the remaining one. Arm processors are present in just four TOP500 systems, three of which employ the new Fujitsu A64FX processor, with the remaining one powered by Marvell’s ThunderX2 processor.
However, China still dominates the list as a country with 226 supercomputers, followed by the US at number two with 114 systems; Japan is third with 30; France has 18 and Germany has 16.
Despite coming in second on system count, the US continues to edge out China in aggregate list performance with 644 petaflops to China’s 565 petaflops. Japan, with its significantly smaller system count, delivers 530 petaflops.
Chinese manufacturers dominate the list in the number of installations with Lenovo (180), Sugon (68) and Inspur (64) accounting for 312 of the 500 systems.
HPE claims 37 systems, while Cray/HPE has 35 systems and Fujitsu by just 13 systems.
