ICL Research Profile

Supercomputer Sites

Overview

With over three decades of tracking the progress of high performance computing, the TOP500 lists continue to provide a reliable historical record of supercomputers worldwide. The lists lay 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 machines’ performance using irregular accesses to memory and fine-grain recursive computations—the very factors that dominate real-world, large-scale scientific workloads.

In November 2023, the 62nd TOP500 list was unveiled during SC23 held in Denver, Colorado. Yet again, U.S. took the crown with Frontier, with a mix of AMD CPUs and GPUs featuring a Cray Slingshot 11 interconnect and built by HP Enterprise. The system’s mix of nearly 9 million cores propelled Frontier into the exascale era achieving nearly 1.2 Eflop/s in HPL, making it the fastest supercomputer in the world by over 2-fold factor over Japan’s Fugaku machine, a CPU-only ARM system. Frontier has now held the first spot for four consecutive lists. The second place finally saw Argonne National Lab’s Aurora system, but running only at about half of its capacity.