Top 10 most powerful supercomputers in the world

Five of the 10 most powerful supercomputers in the world are located in the US, two in China, the rest belong to Japan, Finland and Italy.

The Top500 supercomputer rankings are published twice a year, at the end of May or the beginning of June and November. Supercomputers are huge systems that have millions of times more computing power than devices. common sense in solving complex world problems. They are applied in many fields such as simulating nuclear missile tests, weather forecasting, climate research, testing computer encryption strength.

Frontier (USA)

The Frontier system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the US became the first supercomputer to surpass the one billion billion calculations per second since last year. The machine built by the US Department of Energy dethroned the Fugaku system of the Japanese Riken Center for Computational Science earlier.

Thousands of chips and cooling water pipes inside the Frontier supercomputer. Photo: ORNL

In the benchmark test, Frontier hit 1.19 exaflops, or 1.19 trillion calculations per second. The system is developed on HP's CrayEX platform, contains 9,400 AMD EPYC 64C 2 GHz processors and 37,000 AMD Instinct 250X GPUs, housed in 74 component cabinets, each weighing more than 3,600 kg.

Fugaku (Japan)

Before being surpassed by Frontier in mid-2022, Fugaku holds the position of the world's most powerful supercomputer from 2020. The system, jointly developed by Fujitsu and Riken Research Institute, reaches a speed of 442 petaflops (442 million billion operations per second. ), used to study Covid-19 in 2021.

Supercomputer Fugaku. Photo: Hpcwire

Fugaku is also used in industry. Kawasaki Corporation uses supercomputers to simulate and evaluate the fuel economy and speed of the aircraft. Manufacturer DMG Mori Seiki also uses Fugaku in testing and evaluating the processing time of products with a time of 10 minutes, much lower than the previous 8 hours.

Lumi (Finland)

A corner of the supercomputer Lumi. Photo: Techradar

Lumi is the most powerful supercomputer in Europe and the third in the world with a computing power of 309 petaflops. The system makes full use of AMD-supplied hardware, which is used in areas such as climate change, medicine, artificial intelligence and quantum computing.

Leonardo (Italy)

Leonardo supercomputer. Photo: Leonardo

The supercomputer located in the city of Bologna reached 238.7 petaflops of computing power. The system uses Intel's Xeon Platinum 8358 32C chip and Nvidia's A100 and HDR100 processor. Leonardo has been in operation since November 2022, with a construction cost of $240 million. The software that runs the machine is done by Intel and Nvidia.

IBM Summit (USA)

Summit supercomputer. Photo: CNBC

Spread over an area the size of two tennis courts, the Summit supercomputer, also located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, achieved an average performance of 148.6 petaflops and a maximum of 200 petaflops. IBM's system weighs a total of 340 tons, is equipped with 9,216 22-core IBM Power9 central processors, 27,648 Nvidia Tesla V100 graphics processors and requires 15,000 liters of water per minute to cool.

This supercomputer once stood at number one in the world in 2018 and 2019.

IBM Sierra (USA)

Sierra supercomputer. Photo: Business Insider

Another IBM system currently holds the sixth position with 94.6 petaflops of computing power. Sierra uses a combination of chip models provided by IBM and Nvidia, located in Livermore, California. Sierra's highest position was second in 2018 and 2019.

Sunway TaihuLight (China)

Supercomputer Sunway TaihuLight. Photo: AP

Located at the National Research Center for Parallel Computing Engineering and Technology (NRPCC) in Wuxi City, Sunway TaihuLight has 93 petaflops of computing power. The system uses 40,960 64-bit RISC SW26010 processors based on the Sunway architecture, each containing 256 processing cores and an additional four extra cores for system management, bringing the total number of processor cores to 10,649,600 worldwide. system.

Perlmutter (USA)

The Perlmutter supercomputer. Photo: HPE

Perlmutter is built by HPE, reaches 70.87 petaflops of computing power, uses AMD chips combined with Nvidia. This supercomputer is being located at the US National Energy Research Science Computer Center (NERSC), used by the US Department of Energy for nuclear reaction simulation, climate forecasting, biological research.

Selene (USA)

Supercomputer Selene. Photo: Nvidia

Selene, built in 2020 by Nvidia for Covid-19 research, is located at Nvidia's headquarters in Sunnyvale, California. The system mainly uses AMD and Nvidia chips, reaching a power of 63.46 petaflops.

Tianhe-2A (China)

China's Tianhe-2A supercomputer. Photo: NUDT

Tianhe-2A is located at the NUDT National Supercomputing Center in Guangzhou City. The system was developed by a team of 1,300 Chinese scientists and engineers, which held the strongest position in the world in 2013, 2014 and 2015.

The Top500 project on supercomputers has been carried out annually since 1993 by famous experts such as Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee; Knoxville, Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of the US Center for Scientific Computing for Energy Research; Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim... The June and November rankings are usually published online or at the International Supercomputing Conference and the ACM/IEEE Supercomputing Conference.

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