Did you know that the top 5 countries with the highest number of supercomputers are United States, China, Germany, Japan and France, and that the 500 fastest supercomputers are spread across 34 countries?

A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance compared to a general-purpose computer. Performance of a supercomputer is measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instructions per second (MIPS). Supercomputers contain tens of thousands of processors and can perform billions and trillions of calculations or computations per second. Some supercomputers can perform up to a hundred quadrillion FLOPS.

Since information moves quickly between processors in a supercomputer (compared to distributed computing systems) they are ideal for real-time applications. They are used for data-intensive and computation-heavy scientific and engineering purposes such as quantum mechanics, weather forecasting, oil and gas exploration, molecular modeling, physical simulations, aerodynamics, nuclear fusion research and crypto-analysis.

Supercomputers play a vital role in advancing science, technology, and innovation across a wide range of applications in science, academia, military and industry, writes Nicole Willing of Techopedia. They are the peak of computing technology, capable of processing vast amounts of data and performing complex calculations at rapid speeds. These high-performance machines are used for a wide range of applications, from scientific research to national security simulations, climate modeling, industrial design, and artificial intelligence (AI). 

The escalating demand for massive volumes of cloud-based computing power is bringing supercomputing technologies into hyperscale data centers. And the rapid adoption of AI will likely see more supercomputers being built worldwide and demanded for–from countries and companies. For instance, the UK government announced plans to invest £900 million in a new supercomputer that will be one of the most powerful in Europe to drive UK research and innovation into the potential and safe use of AI technology.

The 500 fastest supercomputers are spread across 34 countries, of which 27 countries have more than one system. From November 2017 until November 2022, China had the highest number of supercomputers. But as of June 2023, the US has resumed the top position on the Top500 list with 150 supercomputers. China has 134 and is followed by Germany, which has 36 supercomputers. Japan and France round out the top five, with the UK, Canada, Brazil, South Korea, and the Netherlands completing the top 10.

The US is also the leader in terms of performance, measured in maximal Linpack performance achieved (Rmax) at 2,400,757 teraFLOPS (TFLOPS). That is well ahead of China’s 465,824 TFLOPS. The Frontier system at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee, US, is the only exascale machine reported with a High-Performance Linpack (HPL) exceeding one Exaflop per second (1 EFLOP/s). The system is based on the HPE Cray EX235a architecture and is equipped with AMD EPYC 64C 2GHz processors and 8,699,904 total cores. Frontier increased its HPL from 1.02 EFLOP/s in November 2022 to 1.194 EFLOP/s in June, a 17% increase. Exascale was seen as only an aspirational goal just a few years ago, indicating the rapid pace of technology development.

The fastest supercomputer was previously the 442 PFLOP/s Fugaku system at the Riken Center for Computational Science (R-CCS) in Kobe, Japan, from June 2020 until June 2022. Fugaku is powered by Fujitsu’s 48-core A64FX system on chip (SoC), making it the first number one system to be powered by ARM processors.

The Summit supercomputer at ORNL held the top spot from June 2018 until November 2019 with a performance of 122.3 PFLOP/s and is now in the fifth position with an upgraded performance of 148.60 PFLOP/s. The Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer at the National Supercomputing Center in the city of Wuxi, China, was the fastest from June 2016 until November 2017 and now ranks seventh with a speed of 93.01 PFLOP/s.

A new supercomputer operated by the Flatiron Institute in New York City now tops the latest Green500 List of the most power-efficient supercomputers in the world, writes Thomas Sumner for Simons Foundation. The revised list, which ranks supercomputers based on the number of FLOPS per watt of power, clocks the new supercomputer at 65.091 billion flops per watt. That edges out the previous record holder, which managed 62.684 billion flops per watt. At 2.038 million billion flops, the new Flatiron Institute supercomputer is also the 405th most powerful computer in the world.

Housed in a data center in New Jersey, the system itself was built by Lenovo and leverages the efficiency capabilities of the company’s ThinkSystem SR670 V2, a server designed to install easily into traditional data centers and to be accessible to more researchers.  Researchers at the Flatiron Institute will tap the new supercomputer’s power to tackle thorny problems in computational astrophysics, biology, mathematics, neuroscience and quantum physics. The system uses the NVIDIA accelerated computing platform, which is well-suited for machine learning applications, such as multibody simulations of the universe’s evolution, predicting how proteins fold and function, and finding correlations in genomic studies. Accelerated computing platforms also excel at linear-algebra calculations that simulate how electrons behave at the quantum scale. That’s because such platforms use graphical processing units (GPUs) to run many more calculations in parallel than traditional central processing units (CPUs) can.

Sources: https://www.techopedia.com/what-is-the-fastest-supercomputer-in-the-world https://www.simonsfoundation.org/2022/11/14/new-flatiron-institute-supercomputer-the-most-power-efficient-ever-built/

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