TOP500 – Dethronement is yet to come

The website top500.org has been publishing updated lists of the most powerful supercomputers twice a year since 1993. The top of the list published in the summer of 2021 – surprisingly – showed no change in comparison with November 2020. But which countries ended up as winners? Read our summary!

The list keeps to being led by Fugaku (RIKEN Center for Computational Science, Kobe) with a performance of 442 petaflops. The supercomputer named after the holy mountain of Japan known by us as Fuji has maintained its top ranking since June 2020. Thereby it has also set the record of its predecessor, “K”, which maintained its global No.1 position for a year after June 2011.

The second-ranking supercomputer was Summit (Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tennessee, USA) although its performance is 148.8 petaflops, i.e., only one-third of that of the record keeper. Although with this performance, it is the fastest one in the mother country of all supercomputers, the United States. Finally, the third to finish on the podium was Sierra (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, California, USA) with a performance of 94.6 petaflops.

Computing

Linpack benchmarking is an internationally accepted measure of the speed of supercomputers. The highest value measured this way and expressed in petaflops (1000000000000000, i.e., 1015, that is, one quadrillion floating-point operations per second) is Rmax, and Rpeak is the theoretical peak performance of the system.

Going green

In addition to having outstanding performance, supercomputers also have outstanding electricity needs. The largest ones consume as much as a town with several thousand inhabitants. Upon the emergence of environmental awareness, the largest supercomputers in the world have also been ranked by energy efficiency in the Green500 list since July 2013. In this list, the Luxembourgian MeluXina (10.52 petaflops) achieved a noticeable 4th place, although its performance “only” secured the 36th place.

New competitors in the playing field

The rate of becoming obsolete is the only thing about supercomputers which is faster than their rate of development; therefore, being included in the list is already a huge achievement. The new pride of the Czechs, Karolina (Ostrava, Czech Republic) debuted at position No.69 with its 6-petaflops performance, which places it at position No.19 within Europe. Of course, huge changes are also expected at the peak; arriving at the exascale range this year is almost taken for granted although petascale category computers have only existed since 2008. The first supercomputer with exascale (1000 petaflops) performance in the US – and most probably, of the world – may be Aurora, which is being built by HPE and Intel for the Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago.

Buckle up, Komondor!

Being included in the top100 is an unbelievable achievement given that the second half of the playing field is also characterised by an extremely close competition. So far, the highest ranking for a Hungarian supercomputer – position No.308 – was awarded to Leo in November 2014. However, a year later in November 2015, Leo was only listed at spot No.402, and Hungary now has no supercomputers among the best ones.

That’s about to change! KIFU’s new machine, Komondor will go live in 2022 with a performance of 5 petaflops. This equals to more than ten times the existing total Hungarian supercomputer capacities. With this, the new Hungarian supercomputer will debut at around position No.60 in the list, and will play an important role in the development of science and innovation.