The 53rd edition of the TOP500 list has been announced. The most recent list of the 500 most powerful non-distributed computer systems in the world signifies a milestone in the 26-year history of the list.
For the first time, all 500 systems deliver a petaflop or more on the High Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark, with the entry level to the list now at 1.022 petaflops. The current and previous lists, which are published twice annually, are available at www.top500.org.
According to the announcement, this latest list remains largely unchanged, with only two new entries in the top 10, one of which was an existing system that was upgraded with additional capacity.
Two IBM-built supercomputers, Summit and Sierra, installed at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, respectively, retain the first two positions on the list. Both derive their computational power from Power 9 CPUs and NVIDIA V100 GPUs. The Summit system slightly improved its HPL result from 6 months ago, delivering a record 148.6 petaflops, while the number two Sierra system remains unchanged at 94.6 petaflops.
The Sunway TaihuLight, a system developed by China’s National Research Center of Parallel Computer Engineering & Technology (NRCPC) and installed at the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi, achieved the number-three position with 93.0 petaflops. It’s powered by more than 10 million SW26010 processor cores.
At number four is the Tianhe-2A (Milky Way-2A) supercomputer, which used a combination of Intel Xeon and Matrix-2000 processors to achieve an HPL result of 61.4 petaflops.
Frontera, the only new supercomputer in the top 10, came in at number five by delivering 23.5 petaflops on HPL. The Dell C6420 system, powered by Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 processors, is installed at the Texas Advanced Computing Center of the University of Texas.
For more information about the sites and systems in the list, view the complete list at www.top500.org/list/2019/06.