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The most exciting thing about the Top500 rankings of supercomputers that come out each June and November is not who is on the top of the list. That’s fun and interesting, of course, but the real thing about the Top500 is the architectural lessons it gives us when we see new systems emerge on the Top500 and we get to see how choices of compute, memory, interconnect, storage, and budget all play out at a system level and across nations and industries.We would normally walk through the top ten machines on the list and then delve into the statistics...

For years, x86 processors and Linux have ruled supercomputing. Linux still runs 500 out of the TOP500 supercomputers in the world. For just about as long, x86 CPUs have dominated supercomputers -- until now. On June 22, Japan's Fugaku supercomputer, powered by Fujitsu's 48-core A64FX SoC and running Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), became the first ARM-powered supercomputer to be dubbed the fastest computer in the world.  In winning over the others, it wasn't even close. Fugaku turned in a High-Performance Linpack (HPL) result of 415.5 petaflops, besting the second-place IBM Summit system by a factor of 2.8x. Fujitsu has been...

The semi-annual Top500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers was released on Nov. 12, with the U.S holding down the top two spots overall.The IBM POWER9 based Summit system has retained its crown that it first achieved in the June 2018 ranking. Summit is installed at the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory and now has performance of 143.5 petaflops per second, up from the 122.3 petaflops the system had when it first came online.The IBM POWER9 Sierra system also improved over the last six months and is now the second most powerful system on the plant...

Summit is an IBM system located at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility. With a theoretical peak double-precision performance of approximately 200 PF, it is one of the most capable systems in the world for a wide range of traditional computational science applications. It is also one of the “smartest” computers in the world for deep learning applications with a mixed-precision capability in excess of 3 EF.#Summit Nodes The basic building block of Summit is the IBM Power System AC922 node. Each of the approximately 4,600 compute nodes on Summit contains two IBM POWER9 processors and 6 NVIDIA Volta V100...

The June 2013 Top500 supercomputer list is in, and 476 of the top 500 fastest supercomputers in the world run Linux. Whether you measure supercomputing by number of systems or overall performance, Linux rules. (Image: Top500)Is that good enough for you? While Linux fans and critics obsess about Linux's failure to sweep Windows off the desktop, they're ignoring that Linux is winning everywhere else, and that when it comes to the highest of high-end computing, Linux rules.Driving the point home, the top 10 fastest supercomputers all run Linux of one sort or the other. You have to go the way...

MANNHEIM, Germany; BERKELEY, Calif.; and KNOXVILLE, Tenn.—For the first time since November 2009, a United States supercomputer sits atop the TOP500 list of the world’s top supercomputers. Named Sequoia, the IBM BlueGene/Q system installed at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory achieved an impressive 16.32 petaflop/s on the Linpack benchmark using 1,572,864 cores. Sequoia is also one of the most energy efficient systems on the list, which will be released Monday, June 18, at the 2012 International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg, Germany. This will mark the 39th edition of the list, which is compiled twice each year. Complete...

HAMBURG, Germany—A Japanese supercomputer capable of performing more than 8 quadrillion calculations per second (petaflop/s) is the new number one system in the world, putting Japan back in the top spot for the first time since the Earth Simulator was dethroned in November 2004, according to the latest edition of the TOP500 List of the world’s top supercomputers. The system, called the K Computer, is at the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science (AICS) in Kobe. The 37th edition of the closely watched list was released Monday, June 20, at the 2011 International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg. The ranking of...

IBM has obliterated the competition in the supercomputing stakes with the top 10 of the top 500 supercomputers in the world, but Microsoft has surprisingly scraped in at number 23 with its Windows HPC Server system. While Microsoft is an unlucky 13 numbers away from the top 10, does the wow start now? Microsoft can’t claim any particular ‘wow’ with its results until it can wrest a top 10 position, let alone the No.1 position away from IBM, but 23 isn’t too bad when we’re talking about a list of 500. But the real news isn’t about Microsoft, it’s about...

Supercomputers based on Apple’s Xserve technology landed four spots on the newest TOP500 list. The announcement came during the 20th International Supercomputer Conference, held this week in Heidelberg, Germany. Presented by the Universities of Mannheim and Tennessee and the National Energy Research Scientific Computing (NESRSC) Center, the TOP500 project collects performance benchmarks for the most powerful computing systems on the planet. The TOP500 list is created by comparing the best performance of the “Linpack” benchmark, which tests the system by making it solve a dense system of linear equations. The TOP500 list is generated twice each year. Four Apple-based supercomputers...

<p>The brand new "Big Mac" supercomputer at Virginia Tech could be the second most powerful supercomputer on the planet, according to preliminary numbers.</p> <p>Early benchmarks of Virginia Tech's brand new supercomputer -- which is strung together from 1,100 dual-processor Power Mac G5s -- may vault the machine into second place in the rankings of the worlds' fastest supercomputers, second only to Japan's monstrously big and expensive Earth Simulator.</p>