Fugaku still reigns as the world’s fastest supercomputer

Fugaku, the supercomputer built by Fujitsu, remains at number one in the TOP500 list of the fastest supercomputers in the world, where it is still three times faster than the nearest competition.

The contest for the fastest remains tight, with only one new entry into the top 10 on the latest list—Perlmutter, at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing (NERSC) Center at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which is part of the US Department of Energy. It joins the list at number five and bumps down numbers six through 10 from the previous list published in November 2020.(A system called Dammam-7 dropped off the top 10.)

The list is updated every June and November and has tracked the development of supercomputer performance and architecture since 1993. The speeds are based on the  High Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark, which measures how well systems solve a dense system of linear equations

Among the top 10 in the latest ranking, five are in the US, three are in China and there is one each in Germany and Italy.

TOP500’s 10 fastest supercomputers, June 2021

Number 1: Fugaku

Fugaku – At 442 Pflop/s, the system hit the same speed as in November. It was built by Fujitsu, has 7,630,848 cores, and resides at the RIKEN Center for Computational Science (R-CCS) in Kobe, Japan.

Number 2: Summit

Summit – The fastest system in the US, Summit, scored 148.8 Pflop/s, the same as last November. It has 4,356 nodes, with two Power9 CPUs each with 22 cores each and six Nvidia Tesla V100 GPUs. The GPUs each have 80 streaming multiprocessors (SM). The nodes are linked together with a Mellanox dual-rail EDR InfiniBand network. Built by IBM, the system resides at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee.