US reclaims top spot for world’s fastest supercomputer

US reclaims top spot for world’s fastest supercomputer

By  Okorie Chioma- June 25, 2018

TOP500 released an update to its list of the fastest supercomputers in the world, with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory leading the way. In its debut last month, Summit clocked in at 200 petaflops of compute power.

Summit uses more than 27,000 Nvidia graphics processing unit chips (GPU), and 5 of the 7 fastest supercomputers in the world utilize Nvidia GPUs like the Tesla V100, which first made its debut in May 2017. Summit has already been used to do things like apply machine learning in the search for genetic links between diseases or explore materials that can be used for superconductors.

“When we first started talking about the original Tesla K80 back in 2015, we were only contributing about 11 percent of the list that year if I add up all the computational horsepower on the top of the list,” Nvidia VP Ian Buck told VentureBeat. “This year, the majority of 56 percent of the computation on the list is coming from GPUs and this really talks to the adoption of accelerated computing, of using GPUs for solving the kinds of problems and building the kinds of systems that are necessary to advance computing.”

Also new to the list is Sierra. Housed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Sierra is now ranked the world’s third fastest supercomputer with 71 petaflops of compute power.

The TOP500 updates it ranking of top supercomputers every six months.

The new rankings were announced today at the International Supercomputing Conference being held this week in Frankfurt, Germany.

Also announced today, Nvidia released nine new GPU Cloud computing containers to make it easier to work with deep learning frameworks.

The United States regains the title of owning the word’s fastest supercomputer after years of Chinese dominance.

China’s Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer and its 93 petaflops of compute power are powered by Sunway SW26010 processor. Based at the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi, China, the supercomputer had been the top ranked supercomputer in the world for the past two years.

Titan, which also uses Nvidia GPUs at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, comes in at seventh fastest in the world. Titan was ranked the fastest supercomputer in November 2012 edition the TOP500 but that title has belonged to Chinese supercomputers since 2013, including Tianhe-2, a supercomputer developed by China’s National University of Defense Technology.

For the first time ever, in TOP500 rankings last fall, China surpassed the United States in total number of ranked supercomputers, 202 to 143.

Many of the world’s supercomputers are being used by governments to carry out high performance computing and train deep AI models with massive amounts of data. For example, the world’s fifth fastest supercomputer and fastest in Japan is named Artificial Intelligence Bridging Cloud (AIBC).