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US Frontier Overtakes Japan’s Fugaku As World’s Most Powerful Supercomputer

  • Posted By
    10Pointer
  • Categories
    Science & Technology
  • Published
    3rd Jun, 2022

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.

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”.

Verifying, please be patient.

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