ICL Research Profile

Overview

With over three decades of tracking the progress of high performance computing, the TOP500 list continues to provide a reliable historical record of supercomputers worldwide. The list lays out critical HPC metrics across all of its 500 machines and draws a rich picture of state of the art in terms of performance, energy consumption, and power efficiency. The TOP500 now features an HPCG ranking, which measures a machine’s performance using irregular accesses to memory and fine-grain recursive computations- the very factors that dominate real-world, large-scale scientific workloads.

In November 2022, the 60th TOP500 list was unveiled during SC22 held in Dallas, Texas. Yet again, U.S. took the crown with Frontier, with a mix of AMD CPUs and GPUs featuring Cray Slingshot 11 interconnect and built by HPE. The system’s mix of nearly 9 thousand cores propelled Frontier into exascale era achieving 1.1 Eflop/s in the HPL benchmark, making it the fastest supercomputer in the world by over 2-fold factor over Japan’s Fugaku machine, a CPU-only ARM system. Frontier now held the first spot for two consecutive lists.