The latest 64th editions of the TOP500 and Green500 lists were released this Monday, 18 November 2024, at the Supercomputing Conference SC in Atlanta, USA. All operational EuroHPC supercomputers have been ranked among the top 266 supercomputers worldwide. The EuroHPC is also committed to procuring environmentally-friendly supercomputers, with many of its systems achieving high positions on the Green500 list. JEDI, the first development module of JUPITER, Europe’s first exascale supercomputer, continues to hold the top spot on the Green500 list.
The headline is, as generally expected, the El Capitan supercomputer, which has been under development for approximately four years at Livermore Labs. This system is an HPE Cray system powered by AMD CPUs and GPUs. As it is reported on the TOP500 website: "The new El Capitan system at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, U.S.A., has debuted as the most powerful system on the list with an HPL score of 1.742 exaFLOPS. It has 11,039,616 combined CPU and GPU cores and is based on AMD 4th generation EPYC processors with 24 cores at 1.8 GHz and AMD Instinct MI300A accelerators. El Capitan relies on a Cray Slingshot 11 network for data transfer and achieves an energy efficiency of 58.89 gigaFLOPS/W. This power efficiency rating helped El Capitan achieve No. 18 on the Green500 list as well". While it did not achieve two exaflops, as some expected, these are still very impressive numbers.
The number two supercomputer system is Frontier, which was previously ranked number one. Its performance benchmark has improved from 1.2 exaFLOPS to 1.35 exaFLOPS, and the total core count has increased to just over 9 million. Aurora is currently ranked third with a consistent performance of just over one exaFLOPS since its entry onto the list at ISC last May. The fourth system is Eagle, which is installed on the Microsoft Azure Cloud, and has a performance of over half an exaFLOPS. Rounding out the top five is the HPC6 system, located at the Eni S.p.A. in Italy.
The rest of the top ten include the Fugaku supercomputer in Japan, the Alps from the Swiss National Supercomputing Center, LUMI in Finland, and Leonardo, which is located at the CINECA Supercomputing Center in Italy. In the top 10, there's one other new system, the Tuolumne HPE Cray system. This is the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) system at Livermore Lab that actually complements El Capitan.
It’s interesting to note that seven of the top ten systems are from Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). Additionally, three of the top ten are powered by NVIDIA chips. In fact, among the systems ranked from 11 to 20, eight utilize NVIDIA technology. This clearly demonstrates that NVIDIA has a strong presence in the top 20 overall.
Intel continues leading the market with 310 CPU entries, followed by AMD with 162 entries, marking it the fastest-growing competitor. NVIDIA is also gaining traction with its Grace chip, which has been featured in nine systems, while Fujitsu's ARM technology has the same number of entries in the TOP500 list.
When examining the GPU market, it’s interesting to note that 290 systems - the majority - do not have any accelerator at all. Among the remaining systems, 184 are equipped with NVIDIA GPUs, while 19 feature AMD GPUs. This trend highlights the impact of the recent releases of the Instinct 250 and 300A models. Additionally, there are five systems using Intel GPUs: one older Xeon Phi system and four utilizing the GPU Max system. Overall, this indicates that NVIDIA and AMD are gradually dominating the market, while Intel is still working to establish its presence.
Currently, the United States hold a dominant position among countries in high-performance computing (HPC). However, it's important to note that China has not participated in the TOP500 rankings since 2016, as it no longer submits benchmark results. This absence affects the overall results. The US has 173 systems listed, which accounts for nearly 35% of the total.
When analyzing the manufacturers, Lenovo leads the pack with 162 out of the 500 systems. HPE follows closely with 115 systems, and it's noteworthy that HPE excels at the higher end of the list. Eviden comes next with 52 systems, while Dell has 37. NVIDIA rounds out the group with 26 systems, highlighting that it is not just a chip provider but also a whole system manufacturer offering a comprehensive software solution suite. Additionally, Fujitsu has 15 systems, and NEC has 14, underscoring the influence of Japanese manufacturers in this sector. Interestingly, Microsoft Azure has eight systems on the list, including one in the top 10, which is impressive and indicates how cloud providers are also delivering high-end systems.
