In a recent article, we mentioned the supercomputer developed for the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the US, which emerged as the world's most powerful supercomputer, taking the top spot from China's Sunway.
Summit was found at the top of the TOP500 list with the fastest supercomputers in the world for the year 2018. It is not surprising that Summit (with Linpack score 122.3 petaflops) takes the lead from Sunway TaihuLight (with Linpack score 93 petaflops). However, China still has the largest number of supercomputers on the list.
The most powerful supercomputers of TOP500 – June 2018
- IBM Summit
- Sunway TaihulLight
- IBM Sierra
- Tianhe-2A
- AI Bridging Cloud Infrastructure (ABCI)
- Piz Daint
- Titan
- Sequoia
- Trinity
- Cori
In the TOP500 list released in November 2017, all supercomputers were powered by Linux. This year the situation does not change as the 500 supercomputers also use Linux, including the new «king» Summit.
While computational power is mainly linked to CPUs, over the years it has begun to shift towards GPUs.
In the case of Summit, the peak performance is 187.7 petaflops, which is the result of the 27,686 GPUs it packs, according to Nvidia. The story for the third member of the Sierra list is similar, as its 17,280 GPUs account for the lion's share of the systems' flops.
An interesting fact is that almost half of the customers who purchase NVIDIA GPUs for HPC, AI or the data analytics sector never submit their system for evaluation to be listed in the TOP500. Many of these systems are suitable for a spot on the list, but the customers either are not interested in that or do not want to make their purchases public.
