Five new supercomputers have entered top 10 on the TOP500 list, but none of them have managed to unseat last year's AMD-powered HPE Frontier system from the top spot.
As TOP500 reports, the 62nd edition of the list, which ranks the 500 most powerful commercially available computer systems, saw the HPE Frontier system located at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) retain first place. Frontier is also the only exascale machine on the list.
There's a new entry in second position in the form of the Intel-powered Aurora system located at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility in Illinois, USA. Aurora may be in second place, but that won't be the case for very long. That's because Aurora isn't finished yet and the numbers submitted for this edition of the list don't measure its peak performance.
The Frontier supercomputer uses a mix of AMD EPYC 64C 2GHz processors and AMD Instinct 250X professional GPUs. In total, there are more than 9,400 CPUs and 37,000 GPUs for a total core count of 8,730,112 and performance exceeding one Exaflop/second.
In comparison, Aurora uses 21,248 Intel Xeon Max Series CPUs and 63,744 Intel Data Center Max Series GPUs. In its current state it achieves 585 Petaflops/second of performance, but holds the promise of a theoretical peak performance exceeding two Exaflops/second once fully deployed.
So Intel looks set to claim first position soon, but AMD isn't standing still and should be back in the top spot pretty swiftly if its efficiency predictions come true in 2025.
This latest edition of the list shows that AMD, Intel, and IBM processors are preferred for High Performance Computing systems. China and the US dominate the list, but the US is pulling ahead. Last year it has 150 machines on the list, but this year that increased to 161. On the other hand, China dropped from 134 last year to just 104 this year.
