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A new era of supercomputers is upon us

1 June, 2022 | Manoj Sukumaran

data center 01_AdobeStock_462312750

Today the TOP500, a rank of the fastest supercomputers in the world, was published yesterday at the International Supercomputing Conference, (ISC2022). Key findings from this vendor agnostic industry effort include:

1. The first ever exascale supercomputer, Frontier, topped the list (able to compute 1018 FP64 double-precision floating-point operations per second). It has more than double the computing performance of the previous top supercomputer in the world, Fugaku. Frontier uses AMD EPYC CPUs and AMD’s Instinct MI250X GPGPUs. The system is designed by HPE Cray and is installed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory of the US Department of Energy.

2. Out of the top 10 supercomputers, 5 were powered by AMD EPYC CPUs, a significant shift in the industry which has been dominated by Intel and IBM CPUs. 

3. Out of the 152 systems commissioned since 2021, Intel CPUs were used for 53% with AMD claiming 46%, another example of the shift in the industry’s CPU preference. Looking at the systems for academic & research use cases, AMD commanded a 73% share. The majority of Intel systems are deployed for commercial or industrial use (typically less than 10 PFlops). 

4. AMD also dominated the Green500 list of most power efficient supercomputers. 4 out of the top 5 greenest systems were powered by AMD processors. 

top 500 and green 500 supercomputer

The deployment of the first exascale supercomputer is a big step for the high-performance computing industry. The race to add more exascale systems to the list is on with Intel’s upcoming generation of Sapphire Rapids CPUs and Ponte Vecchio GPUs powering at least one – Aurora. 

The strides AMD has made in the supercomputing space are very notable, especially because it’s been out of the game for nearly a decade (the Titan supercomputer powered by Opteron CPUs became operational in 2012). Importantly, AMD dominated the league table for both most performance and efficiency ones, two critical aspects of high-performance computing. 

Omdia’s Cloud and Data Center Research Practice publishes quarterly market trackers, analyses, and reports on the topic of data center computing. A new report and forecast focused, specifically on the topic of high-performance computing will be published in the third quarter of 2022.

Today the TOP500, a rank of the fastest supercomputers in the world, was published yesterday at the International Supercomputing Conference, (ISC2022). Key findings from this vendor agnostic industry effort include:

1. The first ever exascale supercomputer, Frontier, topped the list (able to compute 1018 FP64 double-precision floating-point operations per second). It has more than double the computing performance of the previous top supercomputer in the world, Fugaku. Frontier uses AMD EPYC CPUs and AMD’s Instinct MI250X GPGPUs. The system is designed by HPE Cray and is installed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory of the US Department of Energy.

2. Out of the top 10 supercomputers, 5 were powered by AMD EPYC CPUs, a significant shift in the industry which has been dominated by Intel and IBM CPUs. 

3. Out of the 152 systems commissioned since 2021, Intel CPUs were used for 53% with AMD claiming 46%, another example of the shift in the industry’s CPU preference. Looking at the systems for academic & research use cases, AMD commanded a 73% share. The majority of Intel systems are deployed for commercial or industrial use (typically less than 10 PFlops). 

4. AMD also dominated the Green500 list of most power efficient supercomputers. 4 out of the top 5 greenest systems were powered by AMD processors. 

top 500 and green 500 supercomputer

The deployment of the first exascale supercomputer is a big step for the high-performance computing industry. The race to add more exascale systems to the list is on with Intel’s upcoming generation of Sapphire Rapids CPUs and Ponte Vecchio GPUs powering at least one – Aurora. 

The strides AMD has made in the supercomputing space are very notable, especially because it’s been out of the game for nearly a decade (the Titan supercomputer powered by Opteron CPUs became operational in 2012). Importantly, AMD dominated the league table for both most performance and efficiency ones, two critical aspects of high-performance computing. 

Omdia’s Cloud and Data Center Research Practice publishes quarterly market trackers, analyses, and reports on the topic of data center computing. A new report and forecast focused, specifically on the topic of high-performance computing will be published in the third quarter of 2022.

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Manoj Sukumaran
Principal Analyst, Data center IT

Manoj is Omdia’s data center computing and networking expert. He covers trailblazing technologies such as processors that enable the programmability of compute and networking hardware, edge computing, composable infrastructure, and the adoption of open compute hardware. He has over 15 years of experience in engineering and financial services, consulting, and research.

Before joining Omdia, Manoj was the founder and director of QWave India, a hardware engineering services company that specializes in designing data center hardware for clients such as Facebook and LinkedIn. His team delivered Facebook’s first three open compute switches, pioneering the bare metal switching technology that has revolutionized the data center. He also worked on the architecture and design of Open19’s first switch and server. Manoj has also held senior positions in financial services, consulting, and media companies. He holds two bachelor’s degrees—one in physics and one in information technology—and an MBA from India’s Mahatma Gandhi University.

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