Fugaku—the Arm technology-based supercomputer jointly developed by RIKEN and Fujitsu—was awarded the number one spot on the Top500 list for the second time in a row. This achievement further highlights the rapidly evolving demands of high-performance computing (HPC) that Arm technology uniquely addresses through the unmatched combination of power efficiency, performance, and scalability.

In addition to the great work RIKEN and Fujitsu have done, we're seeing more adoption for Arm-based solutions across our ecosystem. ETRI, the national computing institute of the Republic of Korea, recently announced plans to adopt the upcoming Neoverse V1 (formerly code-named Zeus) CPU design, which feature Arm Scalable Vector Extensions (SVE), for its K-AB21 system. ETRI has set a goal of 16 teraflops per CPU and 1600 teraflops per rack for AB 21 (which stands for 'Artificial Brain 21') while reducing power consumption by 60% compared to its target.

The 56th edition of the TOP500 saw the Japanese Fugaku supercomputer solidify its number one status in a list that reflects a flattening performance growth curve. Although two new systems managed to make it into the top 10, the full list recorded the smallest number of new entries since the project began in 1993.

The entry level to the list moved up to 1.32 petaflops on the High Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark, a small increase from 1.23 petaflops recorded in the June 2020 rankings. In a similar vein, the aggregate performance of all 500 systems grew from 2.22 exaflops in June to just 2.43 exaflops on the latest list. Likewise, average concurrency per system barely increased at all, growing from 145,363 cores six months ago to 145,465 cores in the current list.

Intel today announced that Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) will leverage Intel Xeon Scalable processors in "Ruby," its latest high performance computing cluster. The Ruby system will be used for unclassified programmatic work in support of the National Nuclear Security Administration's (NNSA) stockpile stewardship mission, for researching therapeutic drugs and designer antibodies against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, and for other open science work at LLNL.

Ruby was built in collaboration with Intel, LLNL, Supermicro and Cornelis Networks. The system consists of more than 1,500 nodes, each outfitted with Intel Xeon Scalable processors, and features 192 gigabytes of memory. Ruby will deliver 6 petaflops of peak performance and is expected to rank among the world's top 100 most powerful supercomputers.

AMD has won a contract to empower the LUMI supercomputer, designed for the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) in conjunction with 10 European countries. The contract will see AMD provide both the CPU and GPU innards of the LUMI, set to be populated with next-generation AMD Epyc CPUs and AMD Instinct GPUs. The supercomputer, which is set to enter operation come next year, will deliver an estimated 552 petaflop/s - higher than the world's current fastest supercomputer, Fugaku in Japan, which reaches peak performance of 513 petaflop/s - and is an Arm-powered affair.

The contract for LUMI's construction has been won by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), which will be providing an HPE Cray EX supercomputer powered by the aforementioned AMD hardware. LUMI has an investment cost set at 200 million euros, for both hardware, installation, and the foreseeable lifetime of its operation. This design win by AMD marks another big contract for the company, which was all but absent from the supercomputing space until launch, and subsequent iterations, of its Zen architecture and latest generations of Instinct HPC accelerators.

Los Alamos National Laboratory has completed the installation of a next-generation high performance computing platform, with aim to enhance its ongoing R&D efforts in support of the nation's response to COVID-19. Named Chicoma, the new platform is poised to demonstrate Hewlett Packard Enterprise's new HPE Cray EX supercomputer architecture for solving complex scientific problems.

"As extensive social and economic impacts from COVID-19 continue to grip the nation, Los Alamos scientists are actively engaged in a number of critical research efforts ranging from therapeutics design to epidemiological modeling," said Irene Qualters, Associate Laboratory Director for Simulation and Computing at Los Alamos. "High Performance Computing is playing a critical role by allowing scientists to model the complex phenomena involved in viral evolution and propagation."

NVIDIA today announced that the Italian inter-university consortium CINECA—one of the world's most important supercomputing centers—will use the company's accelerated computing platform to build the world's fastest AI supercomputer.

The new "Leonardo" system, built with Atos, is expected to deliver 10 exaflops of FP16 AI performance to enable advanced AI and HPC converged application use cases. Featuring nearly 14,000 NVIDIA Ampere architecture-based GPUs and NVIDIA Mellanox HDR 200 Gb/s InfiniBand networking, Leonardo will propel Italy as the global leader in AI and high performance computing research and innovation.

NVIDIA today announced that it is building the United Kingdom's most powerful supercomputer, which it will make available to U.K. healthcare researchers using AI to solve pressing medical challenges, including those presented by COVID-19.

Expected to come online by year end, the "Cambridge-1" supercomputer will be an NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD system capable of delivering more than 400 petaflops of AI performance and 8 petaflops of Linpack performance, which would rank it No. 29 on the latest TOP500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers. It will also rank among the world's top 3 most energy-efficient supercomputers on the current Green500 list.

In September 2020, Eurocom will launch its newest Mobile Supercomputer, the Sky Z7 Laptop. Users are able to configure up to the highly-anticipated and incredibly powerful, user-upgradeable, NVIDIA RTX 2080 Super (Non-Max Q) desktop graphics card. The laptop will be available with a choice of 10th Generation Intel CPUs up to the i9-10900K on-board CPU. Users are able to configure and re-configure the Sky Z7 with up to 128 GB of high-speed DDR4 memory and up to a whopping 13 TB of SSD storage via user-upgradeable, easy-to-access internal components. The Eurocom Sky Z7 is a Mobile Supercomputer with easy-to-access internal hardware and battery, showcasing Eurocom's commitment to provide power users on-the-go, heavy-duty laptops that are upgradeable, and reconfigurable with the most impressive hardware today and beyond.

The Eurocom Sky Z7 Mobile Supercomputer utilizes the Z490 Chipset and LGA 1200 socket technology configurable with the most powerful desktop GPUs available today, up to the supercharged NVIDIA RTX 2080 Super (Non-Max Q) desktop GPU, which boasts a whopping 3072 CUDA cores with 8 GB GDDR6 video memory and up to 1815 MHz boost clock. The RTX 2080 Super is among the most advanced and sought after desktop GPUs available today due to its unmatched performance when running AAA games and other GPU-intensive applications.

The University of Florida and NVIDIA Tuesday unveiled a plan to build the world's fastest AI supercomputer in academia, delivering 700 petaflops of AI performance. The effort is anchored by a $50 million gift: $25 million from alumnus and NVIDIA co-founder Chris Malachowsky and $25 million in hardware, software, training and services from NVIDIA.

"We've created a replicable, powerful model of public-private cooperation for everyone's benefit," said Malachowsky, who serves as an NVIDIA Fellow, in an online event featuring leaders from both the UF and NVIDIA. UF will invest an additional $20 million to create an AI-centric supercomputing and data center.

Microsoft has held a Build 2020 conference for developers from all over the world, and they live-streamed it online. Among some of the announcements, Microsoft has announced a new supercomputer dedicated to the OpenAI company, which works on building Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). The new supercomputer is a part of Microsoft's Azure cloud infrastructure and it will allow OpenAI developers to train very large scale machine learning models in the cloud. The supercomputer is said to be the fifth most powerful supercomputer in the world with specifications of "more than 285,000 CPU cores, 10,000 GPUs and 400 gigabits per second of network connectivity for each GPU server."

Specific information wasn't announced and we don't know what CPUs and GPUs go into this machine, but we can speculate that the latest Nvidia A100 "Ampere" GPU could be used. The company hasn't yet submitted its entry to the Top500 website, so we can't keep track of the FLOPs count and see what power it holds.

Fujitsu has today officially completed the delivery of the Fugaku supercomputer to the Riken scientific research institute of Japan. This is a big accomplishment as the current COVID-19 pandemic has delayed many happenings in the industry. However, Fujitsu managed to play around that and deliver the supercomputer on time. The last of 400 racks needed for the Fugaku supercomputer was delivered today, on May 13th, as it was originally planned. The supercomputer is supposed to be fully operational starting on the physical year of 2021, where the installation and setup will be done before.

As a reminder, the Fugaku is an Arm-based supercomputer consisting out of 150 thousand A64FX CPUs. These CPUs are custom made processors by Fujitsu based on Arm v8.2 ISA, and they feature 48 cores built on TSMC 7 nm node and running above 2 GHz. Packing 8.786 billion transistors, this monster chips use HBM2 memory instead of a regular DDR memory interface. Recently, a prototype of the Fugaku supercomputer was submitted to the Top500 supercomputer list and it came on top for being the most energy-efficient of all, meaning that it will be as energy efficient as it will be fast. Speculations are that it will have around 400 PetaFlops of general compute power for Dual-Precision workloads, however, for the specific artificial intelligence applications, it should achieve ExaFLOP performance target.

This one here is another shot in the arm when it comes to faith in humanity. Folding@Home, the distributed computing project where users can donate their spare CPU and GPU cycles for a given cause, has hit an absolute bonkers milestone. According to Greg Bowman, Director of Folding@home, the network has reached a peak compute power amounting to some 470 petaFLOPS - more than double that of the world's current supercomputing record holder, the Summit supercomputer, which dishes out 200 peak petaFLOPS. Folding@Home's 470 Petaflops means users donating their spare cycles are delivering more computing power than that which is available in the world's top 7 supercomputers combined.

After some slight service outages where users weren't getting any work units due to the increased number of donors over the last few days, the computing service now seems to be running at full steam ahead. Remember that you can select the causes for which you are donating your computing power: whether cancer, Alzheimer's, Huntington, or Parkinson's disease, as well as some other non-selectable projects.

AMD has scored yet another design win for usage of its high-performance EPYC processors in the Cray Shasta supercomputer. The Cray Shasta will be deployed in the US Navy's Department of Defense Supercomputing Resource Center (DSRC) as part of the High Performance Computing Modernization Program. The peak theoretical computing capability of 12.8 PetaFLOPS, or 12.8 quadrillion floating point operations per second supercomputer will be built with 290,304 AMD EPYC (Rome) processor cores and 112 NVIDIA Volta V100 General-Purpose Graphics Processing Units (GPGPUs). The system will also feature 590 total terabytes (TB) of memory and 14 petabytes (PB) of usable storage, including 1 PB of NVMe-based solid state storage. Cray's Slingshot network will make sure all those components talk to each other at a rate of 200 Gigabits per second.

Navy DSRC supercomputers support climate, weather, and ocean modeling by NMOC, which assists U.S. Navy meteorologists and oceanographers in predicting environmental conditions that may affect the Navy fleet. Among other scientific endeavors, the new supercomputer will be used to enhance weather forecasting models; ultimately, this improves the accuracy of hurricane intensity and track forecasts. The system is expected to be online by early fiscal year 2021.

The UK government has set aside a budget of 1.2 billion GBP, which is roughly around 1.56 billion US Dollars. With this budget, the UK government plans to install the world's most powerful supercomputer used for weather forecasting in the year 2022. Previously, the UK government used three Cray XC40 supercomputers that are capable of achieving a maximum of 14 PetaFLOPs at its peak performance. The future system plans to take that number and make it look tiny. With plans to make it 20 times more powerful than the current machine, we can estimate that the future supercomputer will have above 200 PetaFLOPs of computing performance.

The supercomputer deployment will follow a series of cycles, where one is happening in 2022 and that supercomputer will be six times more powerful than the current solution. To get to that 20 times improvement, the supercomputer will get an upgrade over the next five years' time. While we do not know what will power the new machine, it will almost definitely be a CPU plus multi-GPU node configuration, as GPUs have gained a lot of traction in weather prediction models lately.

This here is an interesting piece of tech news for sure, in that Intel has already scored a pretty massive design win for not one, but two upcoming products. Intel's "Future Xeon Scalable Processors" and the company's "Xe Compute Architecture" have been tapped by the U.S. Department of Energy for incorporation into the new AURORA Supercomputer - one that will deliver exascale performance. AURORA is to be developed in a partnership between Intel and Cray, using the later's Shasta systems and its "Slingshot" networking fabric. But these are not the only Intel elements in the supercomputer design: Intel's DC Optane persistent memory will also be employed (in an as-of-yet-unavailable version of it as well), making this a full win across the prow for Intel.

Höchstleistungsrechenzentrum (HLRS, or High-Performance Computing Center), based in Stuttgart Germany, is building a new cluster supercomputer powered by 10,000 AMD Zen 2 "Rome" 64-core processors, making up 640,000 cores. Called "Hawk," the supercomputer will be HLRS' flagship product, and will open its doors to business in 2019. The slide-deck for Hawk makes a fascinating disclosure about the processors it's based on.

Apparently, each of the 64-core "Rome" EPYC processors has a guaranteed clock-speed of 2.35 GHz. This would mean at maximum load (with all cores loaded 100%), the processor can manage to run at 2.35 GHz. This is important, because the supercomputer's advertised throughput is calculated on this basis, and clients draw up SLAs on throughput. The advertised peak throughput for the whole system is 24.06 petaFLOP/s, although the company is yet to put out nominal/guaranteed performance numbers (which it will only after first-hand testing). The system features 665 TB of RAM, and 26,000 TB of storage.

Fujitsu today announces that its AI Bridging Cloud Infrastructure (ABCI) system has placed 5th in the world, and 1st in Japan, in the TOP500 international performance ranking of supercomputers. ABCI has also taken 8th place in the world in Green500, which ranks outstanding energy saving performance. Fujitsu developed ABCI, Japan's fastest open AI infrastructure featuring a large-scale, power-saving cloud platform geared toward AI processing, based on a tender issued by the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST).

These rankings were announced on June 25 (Japan time) at ISC 2018, an international conference on high performance computing (HPC) held in Germany. TOP500 evaluates and ranks the top 500 computer systems in the world by computational processing speed. Green500 ranks the TOP500-listed supercomputers to offer excellent examples of power consumption performance.

We previously covered in more depth the fact that the US was gearing up to overtake China's Sunway TaihuLight, then the world's fastest supercomputer, with its Summit machine, built in collaboration between IBM (with its water-cooled Power Systems AC922 nodes with 24-core processors and 96 processing threads) and NVIDIA (GV100 GPUs).

Now, this US dream has finally come to pass, and in a big way - the Summit delivers more than double the performance of China's posterchild, coming in at 200 PetaFLOPs of computing power. Summit boasts of 27,648 Volta Tensor Core GPUs and 9,216 CPUs within its 5,600 square feet. The Summit supercomputer consumes 15 MW of power (the site where it's deployed is able to deliver up to 20 MW), which is on-par with China's Sunway - but remember, it more than doubles the peak PetaFlops from 93 to 200. A good step in the battle for supercomputer supremacy, but China still has an increasing foothold in the number of systems it has employed and registered with the TOP500.

Global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. today announced it has added AMD EPYC processors to its Cray CS500 product line. To meet the growing needs of high-performance computing (HPC), the combination of AMD EPYC 7000 processors with the Cray CS500 cluster systems offers Cray customers a flexible, high-density system tuned for their demanding environments. The powerful platform lets organizations tackle a broad range of HPC workloads without the need to rebuild and recompile their x86 applications.

"Cray's decision to offer the AMD EPYC processors in the Cray CS500 product line expands its market opportunities by offering buyers an important new choice," said Steve Conway, senior vice president of research at Hyperion Research. "The AMD EPYC processors are expressly designed to provide highly scalable, energy- and cost-efficient performance in large and midrange clusters."

Eni has launched its new HPC4 supercomputer, at its Green Data Center in Ferrera Erbognone, 60 km away from Milan. HPC4 quadruples the Company's computing power and makes it the world's most powerful industrial system. HPC4 has a peak performance of 18.6 Petaflops which, combined with the supercomputing system already in operation (HPC3), increases Eni's computational peak capacity to 22.4 Petaflops.

According to the latest official Top 500 supercomputers list published last November (the next list is due to be published in June 2018), Eni's HPC4 is the only non-governmental and non-institutional system ranking among the top ten most powerful systems in the world. Eni's Green Data Center has been designed as a single IT Infrastructure to host all of HPC's architecture and all the other Business applications.

China has been increasingly - and steadily - gaining relevance in the supercomputing world, with most of the top-500 entries being controlled by that country. In fact, China can boast of having the number one supercomputer in the world, the Sunway TaihuLight, which can deliver 93 PetaFLOPS of computing power - just 3x more computational power than the second most powerful machine, China's own Tianhe-2). However, supercomputing, and the amount of money that's earned by selling processing slices of these supercomputers for private or state contractors, i a very attractive pull - especially considering the increasingly more expensive computational needs of the modern world.

The Summit is to be the United State's call to fame in that regard, bringing the country back to number one in raw, top-of-the-line single-machine supercomputing power. Summit is promising to more than double the PetaFLOPS of China's TaihuLight, to over 200 PetaFLOPs. That amounts to around 11x more processing grunt than its predecessor, the Titan, in a much smaller footprint - the Titan's 18,688 processing nodes will be condensed to just ~4,600 nodes on the Summit, with each node achieving around 40 TeraFLOPS of computing power. The hardware? IBM and NVIDIA, married in water-cooled nodes with the powerful GV100 accelerator that's still eluding us enthusiasts - but that's a question for another day.

NVIDIA at the Supercomputing 2017 conference announced a major upgrade of its new SaturnV AI supercomputer, which when complete, the company claims, will be not just one of the world's top-10 AI supercomputers in terms of raw compute power; but will also the world's most energy-efficient. The SaturnV will be a cluster supercomputer with 660 NVIDIA DGX-1 nodes. Each such node packs eight NVIDIA GV100 GPUs, which takes the machine's total GPU count to a staggering 5,280 (that's GPUs, not CUDA cores). They add up to an FP16 performance that's scraping the ExaFLOP (1,000-petaFLOP or 10^18 FLOP/s) barrier; while its FP64 (double-precision) compute performance nears 40 petaFLOP/s (40,000 TFLOP/s).

SaturnV should beat Summit, a supercomputer being co-developed by NVIDIA and IBM, which in turn should unseat Sunway TaihuLight, that's currently the world's fastest supercomputer. This feat gains prominence as NVIDIA SaturnV and NVIDIA+IBM Summit are both machines built by the American private-sector, which are trying to beat a supercomputing leader backed by the mighty Chinese exchequer. The other claim to fame of SaturnV is its energy-efficiency. Before its upgrade, SaturnV achieved an energy-efficiency of a staggering 15.1 GFLOP/s per Watt, which was already the fourth "greenest." NVIDIA expects the upgraded SaturnV to take the number-one spot.

The fiftieth TOP500 list of the fastest supercomputers in the world has China overtaking the US in the total number of ranked systems by a margin of 202 to 143. It is the largest number of supercomputers China has ever claimed on the TOP500 ranking, with the US presence shrinking to its lowest level since the list's inception 25 years ago.

Just six months ago, the US led with 169 systems, with China coming in at 160. Despite the reversal of fortunes, the 143 systems claimed by the US gives them a solid second place finish, with Japan in third place with 35, followed by Germany with 20, France with 18, and the UK with 15.

The United States has been being pushed down in the TOP500 standings for some time courtesy China, whom has taken the 1st and 2nd place seats from the US with their Sunway TaihuLight and Tianhe-2 Supercomputers (at a Linpack performance of 93 and 33.9 Petaflops, respectively). It seemed though the crown was stolen from America, 3rd place was relatively safe for the former champs. Not so. America has been pushed right off the podium in the latest TOP500 refresh... not by China though, but Switzerland?

Developing supercomputers isn't for the faint of heart. Much less it is for those that are looking for fast development and deployment time-frames. And as such, even as the world's supercomputers are getting increasingly faster and exorbitantly expensive to develop and deploy, players who want to stay ahead have to think ahead as well. To this end, the US Department of Energy has awarded a total of $258M in research contracts to six of the US's foremost tech companies to accelerate the development of Exascale Supercomputer technologies (AMD, Cray, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM, Intel, and NVIDIA.) These companies will be working over a three year contract period, and will have to support at least 40% of the project cost - to help develop the technologies needed to build an exascale computer for 2021. It isn't strange that the companies accepted the grant and jumped at the opportunity: 60% savings in research and development they'd have to do for themselves is nothing to scoff at.

Supercomputers birthed from the project are expected to be in the exaFLOPS scale of computing performance, which is around 50 times more processing power than the generation of supercomputers being installed now. Since traditional supercomputing knowledge and materials are known to falter at the objective level of exaFLOPS performance, the PathForward program - which looks to ensure achievement of such systems in a timely fashion to ensure US leadership in the field of supercomputing - will need to see spurred research and development, which the $258M grant is looking out to do.