Supercomputers

The demand for high-performing computing systems in market research, scientific and engineering work, and other business-associated models continues to surge today. Supercomputing has been of great importance throughout its history because it has been the enabler of important advances in crucial aspects of national defense, scientific discovery, and addressing problems of societal importance. At present, supercomputers are used to tackle challenging problems in stockpile stewardship, defense intelligence, climate prediction, and earthquake modeling, transportation, manufacturing, societal health and safety, and in virtually every area of basic scientific understanding. The role of supercomputers in all of these areas is becoming more important, and supercomputing is having an ever-greater influence on future progress. 

Increasing investment and expanding the user base of supercomputers help drive innovation and improvement forward in academia, government, and the private sector. 

World’s top 5 supercomputers-

Tianhe-2

Tianhe-2, whose name translates as “MilkyWay-2,” originally debuted in the world in June 2013. But despite upgrades over the years to 4,981,760 cores running at 61.4 petaFLOPS, it's now just barely hanging on to a spot in the top five. Such is the fleeting glory of a modern supercomputer. Tianhe-2 is developed by China's National University of Defense Technology, which processes at a great 33.9 petaflops, nearly twice the performance of the Titan or Sequoia, and over 10 times the performance of Tianhe-1A. The system runs on a mix of Intel Xeon E5 processors, custom processors, and Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors, nearly 3,120,000 cores in total.

Fugaku 

Boasting nearly 7.3 million cores and a speed of 415.5 petaFLOPS, Fugaku brings HPC technology one step closer to the promised exascale era. Fugaku is designed for applications that will address high-priority social and scientific issues. Its core features include low power consumption, high computational performance, user convenience, and ability to produce ground-breaking results; power consumption of 30 to 40 MW, and its design suited for AI applications such as deep learning.

Sierra

Sierra initially debuted on the June 2018 list with 71.6 petaFLOPS. Optimization later pushed the processing speed on its 1,572,480 cores to 94.6 petaFLOPS, earning it the #2 spots in November 2018. However, the ascension of a new number one in June 2020 pushes Sierra back to the third position. Sierra, one of the world’s fastest supercomputers, is developed for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for use by the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) as the second Advanced Technology System. This supercomputer, which combines IBM’s Power 9 processors and NVIDIA’s Volta graphics processing units, is over five times more power-efficient than Sequoia, with a peak power consumption of approximately 11 MW.

Summit

Summit, a supercomputer developed by IBM for use at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is capable of 200 petaFLOPS, making it the fastest supercomputer in the world. Its current LINPACK benchmark is clocked at 148.6 petaFLOPS. Since its debut on the June 2018 list, Summit improved its initial High-Performance Linpack (HPL) performance from 122.3 to the current 148.6 petaFLOPS. Unusually for such a high-performing machine, Summit also initially ranked third on the GreenTop500, which measures energy efficiency in supercomputers, though it has since dropped to ninth place.

Sunway TaihuLight

Sunway TaihuLight dominated the list for two years after its debut in June 2016. At that time, its 93.01 petaFLOPS and 10,649,000 cores made it the world’s most powerful supercomputer by a wide margin, boasting more than five times the processing power of its nearest competitor (ORNL’s Titan) and nearly 19 times more cores. The supercomputer uses a total of 40,960 Chinese-designed SW26010 manycore 64-bit RISC processors based on the Sunway architecture. Each processor chip carries 256 processing cores and an additional four auxiliary cores for system management (also RISC cores, just more fully-featured) for a total of 10,649,600 CPU cores across the entire system. 

The Future

Supercomputing technology has indelibly changed how we approach complex issues in our world, from weather forecasting and climate modeling to protecting the security of our nation from cyberattacks. All of the world’s most capable supercomputers now run on Linux, and with the 30th anniversary of the creation of Linux fast approaching this summer, it’s an important moment to consider how the US can strengthen its advanced cyber infrastructure and invest in the next generation of supercomputers.

Supercomputing has the potential to be the underlying layer to support solutions for many of the world’s most pressing contemporary challenges like global privacy and identity issues, stalemates in medical research, and sustainable supply-chain logistics, etc.