Context
According to the 59th edition of the Top 500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers unveiled by Germany, ORNL’s Supercomputer Frontier from the US.
About Frontier:The supercomputer
- The supercomputer – Frontier, which was built for the US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), has broken the exascale speed barrier with a Linmark benchmark score of 1.1 exaflops, making it the world’s first supercomputer to do so. Whereas, 1 exaflop is equivalent to 1,000 petaflops.
- Fugaku, installed at the RIKEN Center for Computational Science in Kobe, Japan, has a Linmark benchmark score of 442 petaflops (1 exaflop is equivalent to 1,000 petaflops).
- The most powerful supercomputer in the world is expected to reach even higher levels of speed with a theoretical peak performance of 2 exaflops.
- Frontier features a total of 8,730,112 cores and is designed on the newest HPE Cray EX235a architecture with AMD EPYC 64C 2GHz processors.
- Fugaku, now the second-most powerful supercomputer, has 7,630,848 cores.
- Frontier is also ranked number one as the world’s most energy-efficient supercomputer, on the Green500 list.
Rankings
As per the 59th edition of the Top500 list-
- The top two systems are followed by a new LUMI system, installed at the EuroHPC centre at CSC in Finland (151.9 petaflops)
- Summit, an IBM-built system at ORNL in Tennessee, U.S. (148.8 petaflops)
- Sierra, a system at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the U.S. (94.6 petaflops)
Significance
- The supercomputer will be able to help with modelling and simulating complex scientific research, across biological, physical and chemical sciences.
- It can be used to develop AI models that are 4.5X faster and 8X larger, allowing to train more data that can increase predictability and speed time-to-discovery.
- Frontier is also ranked number one as the world’s most energy-efficient supercomputer, on the Green500 list, which measures supercomputing energy use and efficiency, with 52.23 gigaflops performance per watt, making it 32% more energy-efficient compared to the previous number one system.
Supercomputer in India
- Mihir: Mihir (146th on the list), clubs with Pratyush to generate enough computing power to match PARAM-Siddhi.
- PARAM-Siddhi: It is the second Indian supercomputer to be entered in the top 100 on the Top500 list.
- The supercomputer was established earlier this year, under the National Supercomputer Mission (NSM) and is going to be installed in the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing’s (C-DAC) unit.
- Pratyush: It is a supercomputer used for weather forecasting at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, ranked 78th on the November edition of the list.
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About Fugaku
- It is a key national technology that has been developed with the goal to achieve research results that ultimately will help in building a long-lived and healthy society, better energy use and disaster mitigation.
- The computer has 100 times the application performance of the K supercomputer and is developed to implement high-resolution, long-duration and large-scale simulations.
- It started development in the year 2014 as the successor to the K computer. It is built with the Fujitsu A64FX microprocessor.
- Fugaku has topped the Top500 list, a supercomputer benchmark index, for two consecutive years.
- A portion of Fugaku’s research is said to be dedicated to COVID-19 related projects.
- It aims to make the device core of Japan’s computing infrastructure.
- It will help in building a long-lived and healthy society.
- It also aims to establish the government’s vision of making “ultra-smart Society 5.0”.
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