The 66th edition of the TOP500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers was announced today at the SC25 Conference in St Louis, Missouri. The new list reflects continued U.S. leadership in high-performance computing (HPC), historic European milestones, and growing global diversity across architectures and energy-efficient design.

El Capitan Extends Leadership Across Benchmarks
The El Capitan system at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) remains the undisputed leader of global HPC. Based on the HPE Cray EX255a architecture, powered by AMD 4th Gen EPYC CPUs and AMD Instinct MI300A accelerators, El Capitan achieved 1.809 Exaflop/s on the HPL benchmark—a significant remeasurement that further strengthens its position as the fastest computer in the world. El Capitan also dominates the HPCG benchmark, delivering 17.41 HPCG-Petaflop/s, making it the #1 for real-world application performance. On the HPL-MxP mixed-precision benchmark, it recorded 16.7 Exaflop/s, confirming its versatility in AI and data-driven workloads. With 11.34 million cores and an energy efficiency of 60.9 GFlops/Watt, El Capitan exemplifies the current generation of exascale computing.

AMD's expertise in the supercomputers sector seems to pay off as the company secured a $1 billion partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) to build two next-generation supercomputers aimed at scientific and national security challenges, from nuclear fusion research to cancer treatments. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said the initiative will "supercharge" progress in nuclear energy, defense technologies and drug discovery, accelerating breakthroughs that traditionally take decades. The first system, Lux, is set to go online within six months. Co-developed by AMD, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Lux will be powered by AMD's Instinct MI355X AI accelerators alongside AMD CPUs and networking chips. ORNL Director Stephen Streiffer noted that Lux will deliver roughly three times the AI performance of today's top supercomputers, while AMD CEO Lisa Su called it "the fastest deployment of this scale we've ever seen." A second system, dubbed Discovery, will follow later in the decade. Built on AMD's upcoming MI430 AI chips, the more advanced machine is expected to be completed by 2028 and operational by 2029. Both systems are part of a broader U.S. effort to maintain leadership in high-performance computing and artificial intelligence.

According to Reuters, the DoE's choice of AMD reflects confidence in the company's proven HPC track record, particularly with Frontier and El Capitan, the world's fastest supercomputers, which also runs on AMD hardware. Wright added that these new systems will help simulate complex processes like plasma dynamics for fusion energy and molecular interactions for drug development. "We're going to see massively faster progress toward harnessing fusion and treating diseases that are still death sentences today," he said. Together, Lux and Discovery mark a milestone for both AMD and U.S. scientific computing and build momentum for AMD's upcoming MI400 accelerators series.

Today, IBM and AMD announced plans to develop next-generation computing architectures based on the combination of quantum computers and high-performance computing, known as quantum-centric supercomputing. AMD and IBM are collaborating to develop scalable, open-source platforms that could redefine the future of computing, leveraging IBM's leadership in developing the world's most performant quantum computers and software, and AMD's leadership in high-performance computing and AI accelerators.

Quantum computing is a completely different way to represent and process information. While classical computers use bits that can only be either a zero or one, quantum computers' qubits represent information according to the quantum mechanical laws of nature. These properties enable a much richer computational space to explore solutions to complex problems beyond the reach of classical computing alone, including in fields such as drug discovery, materials discovery, optimization, and logistics.

The 65th edition of the TOP500 showed that the El Capitan system retains the No. 1 position. With El Capitan, Frontier, and Aurora, there are now 3 Exascale systems leading the TOP500. All three are installed at Department of Energy (DOE) laboratories in the United States.

The El Capitan system at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, California, remains the No. 1 system on the TOP500. The HPE Cray EX255a system was measured with 1.742 EFlop/s on the HPL benchmark. LLNL now also submitted a measurement for the HPCG benchmark, achieving 17.41 Petaflop/s, which makes the system the new No. 1 on this ranking as well.

Today, AMD showcased its ongoing high performance computing (HPC) leadership at Supercomputing 2024 by powering the world's fastest supercomputer for the sixth straight Top 500 list.

The El Capitan supercomputer, housed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), powered by AMD Instinct MI300A APUs and built by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), is now the fastest supercomputer in the world with a High-Performance Linpack (HPL) score of 1.742 exaflops based on the latest Top 500 list. Both El Capitan and the Frontier system at Oak Ridge National Lab claimed numbers 18 and 22, respectively, on the Green 500 list, showcasing the impressive capabilities of the AMD EPYC processors and AMD Instinct GPUs to drive leadership performance and energy efficiency for HPC workloads.

Today, AMD announced the availability of the AMD Instinct MI300X accelerators - with industry leading memory bandwidth for generative AI and leadership performance for large language model (LLM) training and inferencing - as well as the AMD Instinct MI300A accelerated processing unit (APU) - combining the latest AMD CDNA 3 architecture and "Zen 4" CPUs to deliver breakthrough performance for HPC and AI workloads.

"AMD Instinct MI300 Series accelerators are designed with our most advanced technologies, delivering leadership performance, and will be in large scale cloud and enterprise deployments," said Victor Peng, president, AMD. "By leveraging our leadership hardware, software and open ecosystem approach, cloud providers, OEMs and ODMs are bringing to market technologies that empower enterprises to adopt and deploy AI-powered solutions."

When Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) announced the creation of a two-ExaFLOP supercomputer named El Capitan, we heard that AMD would power it with its Instinct MI300 accelerator. Today, LNLL published a Tweet that states, "We've begun receiving & installing components for El Capitan, @NNSANews' first #exascale #supercomputer. While we're still a ways from deploying it for national security purposes in 2024, it's exciting to see years of work becoming reality." As published images show, HPE racks filled with AMD Instinct MI300 are showing up now at LNLL's facility, and the supercomputer is expected to go operational in 2024. This could mean that November 2023 TOP500 list update wouldn't feature El Capitan, as system enablement would be very hard to achieve in four months until then.

The El Capitan supercomputer is expected to run on AMD Instinct MI300A accelerator, which features 24 Zen4 cores, CDNA3 architecture, and 128 GB of HBM3 memory. All paired together in a four-accelerator configuration goes inside each node from HPE, also getting water cooling treatment. While we don't have many further details on the memory and storage of El Capitan, we know that the system will exceed two ExFLOPS at peak and will consume close to 40 MW of power.

Valve has posted advance notice that Steam will not officially support macOS versions 10.11 ("El Capitan") and 10.12 ("Sierra") from September 1 2023. After this date "the Steam Client will no longer run on those versions of macOS." Valve recommends that users should upgrade to a newer version of macOS, if they intend to continue running Steam and related games and products. The cited reason for ending support is: "core features in Steam rely on an embedded version of Google Chrome, which no longer functions on older versions of macOS. In addition, future versions of Steam will require macOS feature and security updates only present in macOS 10.13 (High Sierra) and above."

Last week, Valve announced that support for Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1 operating systems would cease at the very beginning of 2024. It has been a while since older versions of macOS have been declared as unsupported by the Steam Client - Valve announced, way back in late 2018, that it would stop supporting macOS versions 10.7 ("Lion"), 10.8 ("Mountain Lion"), 10.9 ("Mavericks") and 10.10 ("Yosemite") by January 1 2019. Again, an embedding of an iteration of Google Chrome was given as the main reason behind this discontinuation.

During its CES 2023 keynote, AMD announced its latest Instinct MI300 APU, a first of its kind in the data center world. Combining the CPU, GPU, and memory elements into a single package eliminates latency imposed by long travel distances of data from CPU to memory and from CPU to GPU throughout the PCIe connector. In addition to solving some latency issues, less power is needed to move the data and provide greater efficiency. The Instinct MI300 features 24 Zen4 cores with simultaneous multi-threading enabled, CDNA3 GPU IP, and 128 GB of HBM3 memory on a single package. The memory bus is 8192-bit wide, providing unified memory access for CPU and GPU cores. CLX 3.0 is also supported, making cache-coherent interconnecting a reality.

The Instinct MI300 APU package is an engineering marvel of its own, with advanced chiplet techniques used. AMD managed to do 3D stacking and has nine 5 nm logic chiplets that are 3D stacked on top of four 6 nm chiplets with HBM surrounding it. All of this makes the transistor count go up to 146 billion, representing the sheer complexity of a such design. For performance figures, AMD provided a comparison to Instinct MI250X GPU. In raw AI performance, the MI300 features an 8x improvement over MI250X, while the performance-per-watt is "reduced" to a 5x increase. While we do not know what benchmark applications were used, there is a probability that some standard benchmarks like MLPerf were used. For availability, AMD targets the end of 2023, when the "El Capitan" exascale supercomputer will arrive using these Instinct MI300 APU accelerators. Pricing is unknown and will be unveiled to enterprise customers first around launch.

The Exascale supercomputing race is now well underway, as the US-based Frontier supercomputer got delivered, and now we wait to see the remaining systems join the race. Today, during 79th HPC User Forum at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Terri Quinn at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) delivered a few insights into what El Capitan exascale machine will look like. And it seems like the new powerhouse will be based on AMD's Instinct MI300 APU. LLNL targets peak performance of over two exaFLOPs and a sustained performance of more than one exaFLOP, under 40 megawatts of power. This should require a very dense and efficient computing solution, just like the MI300 APU is.

As a reminder, the AMD Instinct MI300 is an APU that combines Zen 4 x86-64 CPU cores, CDNA3 compute-oriented graphics, large cache structures, and HBM memory used as DRAM on a single package. This is achieved using a multi-chip module design with 2.5D and 3D chiplet integration using Infinity architecture. The system will essentially utilize thousands of these APUs to become one large Linux cluster. It is slated for installation in 2023, with an operating lifespan from 2024 to 2030.

AMD at its 2020 Financial Analyst Day event unveiled its upcoming CDNA GPU-based compute accelerator architecture. CDNA will complement the company's graphics-oriented RDNA architecture. While RDNA powers the company's Radeon Pro and Radeon RX client- and enterprise graphics products, CDNA will power compute accelerators such as Radeon Instinct, etc. AMD is having to fork its graphics IP to RDNA and CDNA due to what it described as market-based product differentiation.

Data centers and HPCs using Radeon Instinct accelerators have no use for the GPU's actual graphics rendering capabilities. And so, at a silicon level, AMD is removing the raster graphics hardware, the display and multimedia engines, and other associated components that otherwise take up significant amounts of die area. In their place, AMD is adding fixed-function tensor compute hardware, similar to the tensor cores on certain NVIDIA GPUs.

AMD has been on a roll in both consumer, professional, and exascale computing environments, and it has just snagged itself another hugely important contract. The US Department of Energy (DOE) has just announced the winners for their next-gen, exascale supercomputer that aims to be the world's fastest. Dubbed "El Capitan", the new supercomputer will be powered by AMD's next-gen EPYC Genoa processors (Zen 4 architecture) and Radeon GPUs. This is the first such exascale contract where AMD is the sole purveyor of both CPUs and GPUs, with AMD's other design win with EPYC in the Cray Shasta being paired with NVIDIA graphics cards.

El Capitan will be a $600 million investment to be deployed in late 2022 and operational in 2023. Undoubtedly, next-gen proposals from AMD, Intel and NVIDIA were presented, with AMD winning the shootout in a big way. While initially the DOE projected El Capitan to provide some 1.5 exaflops of computing power, it has now revised their performance goals to a pure 2 exaflop machine. El Capitan willl thus be ten times faster than the current leader of the supercomputing world, Summit.