The TOP500 supercomputer ranking appears twice a year and consists of, among other things: a list TOP500where machines are sorted by capacity, that is, by capacity Green500 ListThe machines are sorted according to energy efficiency. On the second New Polish supercomputer (Or more precisely, the part that performs calculations on the GPU) The Helios took third place very highly with a score of 66.948 GFlops/W, as the two facilities in front of them have much lower efficiency. This is great news because Energy efficiency translates directly into the cost of performing calculationsThis in turn means that more entities can afford to use the Polish supercomputer, which ranked 55th in the latest performance ranking.
>> Read also: I saw the latest Polish supercomputer. It is one of the most modern machines in the world
Green500 June 2024 list
It seems that such good results are being achieved in the field of energy efficiency This is largely due to accelerators Nvidia GH200 Super ChipBecause the top three places and a total of four of the top five places in the latest Green500 ranking are occupied by machines equipped with them. It’s no wonder Nvidia can’t keep up with its production — putting a 72-core ARM processor, LPDDR5X memory, and a fast GPU on a single PCB is not only fast, it also saves a lot of power when transferring data between systems.
Helios supercomputer
So Nvidia has something to be happy about, because rankings like these show that the competition has some catching up to do. Especially competition from Intel. The most commented on position in the new TOP500 list is No. 2, held by the Aurora supercomputer.
Aurora supercomputer
Aurora was first announced nine years ago and was intended to be a showcase of Intel’s power. Five years ago, it was announced that the project’s assumptions had been changed, and the machine would be delivered to Argonne National Laboratory in 2021 and would be the first supercomputer to achieve Exaflops of computing power thanks to the latest Intel processors and accelerators. In 2023, Intel said that while the Aurora still exists and won’t be the first Exaflops computer (the AMD-chip-based Frontier, meanwhile, has launched), it will be the first computer to achieve two Exaflops of peak computing power. In 2024, Aurora is finally almost ready, but it still has to acknowledge the superiority of Frontier, which is already more than two years old.
TOP500 June 2024 list
Although Aurora’s maximum computing power is actually approximately 2 exaflops, this is only temporary power and during this time the supercomputer can consume up to 60 kilowatts of power, more than twice what Frontier consumes. The consolation is Aurora’s first place on the HPL-MxP list, which is supposed to be a ranking of machine speeds in AI calculations, but with such power efficiency and constant technical issues during implementation, it’s hard not to assume that Aurora, rather than a showcase of Intel’s power, was a Great ad for Nvidia and AMD solutions.
Frontier supercomputers
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