Frontier wins fifth consecutive title in the 'TOP500' supercomputer calculation speed ranking, while Aurora, which was expected to grow, comes in second and Japan's Fugaku comes in fourth.

by Carlos Jones/ORNL, US Dept. of Energy

The 63rd ranking of the 'TOP500' supercomputers, which are released every June and November, has been announced, with Oak Ridge National Laboratory's 'Frontier' retaining the top spot for the fifth consecutive term. Meanwhile, Argonne Leadership Computing Facility's (ALCF) 'Aurora,' which has appeared in the rankings since the last time and was expected to overtake Frontier if in good condition, remained in second place this time as well.

Frontier keeps top spot, but Aurora officially becomes the second exascale machine | TOP500

Frontier is a supercomputer installed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, USA, and has a score of 1.2066EFlops/s on the HPL, which is the standard benchmark for high performance computing (HPC). It uses the HPE Cray EX architecture, which combines the AMD EPYC CPU and the AMD Instinct MI250X accelerator, and has a total of 8,699,904 CPU and GPU cores. In addition to its high computing power, it also has an astonishing power efficiency of 52.93GFlops/W, and is ranked 13th in the GREEN500, a ranking of supercomputers with good power efficiency.

The second place winner is Aurora, a supercomputer installed at the ALCF in Illinois. Its HPL score was 1.012EFlops/s, making it the second supercomputer to reach exascale after Frontier.

While Frontier is made by AMD, Aurora is characterized by a combination of Intel Xeon CPU Max series processors and Intel Data Center GPU Max series accelerators. Although it is still under construction, it suddenly ranked second in the TOP500 in November 2023. Once completed, it is expected to have a performance of 2EFlops, but since it is still in the incomplete stage this time, it has not yet taken the top spot.

In third place is Eagle, which, like Aurora, made its debut in the TOP500 in November 2023. Its HPL score of 561.2 PFlops/s is a big difference from the top two, but it is the highest ranking for a cloud system. It is composed of an Intel Xeon Platinum 8480C processor and an NVIDIA H100 accelerator.

Fugaku, a well-known Japanese supercomputer, also remained in fourth place. Fugaku has been in first place for four consecutive periods from the 55th in June 2020 to the 58th announced in November 2021, and has continued to hold onto its position in the top ranks ever since. Its HPL score of 442 PFlop/s is the highest of any supercomputer outside of the United States.

As for supercomputers in other regions, there is LUMI, owned by EuroHPC/CSC in Finland, which ranked 5th with an HPL score of 380 PFlop/s.

Also making its first appearance in the top 10 is the Swiss National Supercomputing Center's 'Alps,' which came in 6th with an HPL score of 270 PFlop/s.

By the way, there are other supercomputer rankings besides the 'TOP500', and Fugaku has won first place in the 'HPCG' and 'Graph500' breadth-first search categories for nine consecutive periods.

Supercomputer 'Fugaku' HPCG ranking results | RIKEN
https://www.riken.jp/pr/news/2024/20240513_1/index.html

Using the supercomputer 'Fugaku,' RIKEN achieved the world's number one ranking in Graph500
https://www.riken.jp/pr/news/2024/20240513_2/index.html