The race for exascale supercomputers materializes frankly with for the first time the passage of a symbolic course on the Linpack benchmark. A new record is set by the supercomputer frontier of Oak Ridge designed by Cray based on third generation AMD Epyc processors (Epyc Milan) and AMD Instinct MI250X accelerators which is credited with 1.1 exaflop with Linpack FP64 and until 1.69 peak exaflop.
He therefore becomes the new champion of the Top500 supercomputers, ahead Fugaku, the long-time leading Japanese supercomputer with its 442 petaflops. Frontier is credited with several other records, such as that of the most efficient AI system in the world with 6.88 exaflops on the HPL-AI benchmark, but also that of the best energy efficiency, which places it at the top of the ranking. Green500 with a processing capacity of 52.23 Gigaflops per Watt.
These results are a great promotion of AMD components that are found in 5 supercomputers of the World Top10 and with a growing presence in systems integrating the Top500, not to mention a dominance over the Top10 of the Green500, notes the site Tom’s Hardware.
The first official exascale supercomputer
With 602,112 CPU cores and 4.6 petabytes of DDR4 RAM along with 37,888 AMD Instinct MI250X GPUs, representing over 8 million GPU cores paired with 4.6 petabytes of fast HBM memory, all with Cray interconnect and Liquid-cooled, the supercomputer is used by the US Department of Energy at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.
The set includes some 60 million components but has not been immune to electronic component shortages, leading the US government to invoke the Defense Act and national security to gain priority access to supply chains.
Because if Frontier is officially the first (and only) validated exascale system, it is rumored that China already has at least two exascale-level systems, without having submitted them to official benchmarks.
In the absence of data or even details on the characteristics of these mysterious supercomputers, it is difficult to know what is going on and if they are really capable of achieving exascale performance under the conditions of current measurement tools.
Europeans in the world Top10
According to the updated ranking of the Top500 supercomputers, the first European system is LUMI of the EuroHPC / CSC located in Finland and offering a performance of 151.9 petaflops, placing it in third position worldwide.
In tenth position, we find the supercomputer Adastra located in France and operated by the GENCI-CINES (Large National Intensive Computing Equipment – National Computer Center for Higher Education), with a power of 46.10 petaflops.
Both also run third-generation AMD Epyc processors and AMD Instinct MI250X accelerators.
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