June 2018

The TOP500 celebrates its 25th anniversary with a major shakeup at the top of the list. For the first time since November 2012, the US claims the most powerful supercomputer in the world, leading a significant turnover in which four of the five top systems were either new or substantially upgraded.

Summit, an IBM-built supercomputer now running at the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), captured the number one spot with a performance of 122.3 petaflops on High Performance Linpack (HPL), the benchmark used to rank the TOP500 list. Summit has 4,356 nodes, each one equipped with two 22-core Power9 CPUs, and six NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs. The nodes are linked together with a Mellanox dual-rail EDR InfiniBand network.

Sunway TaihuLight, a system developed by China’s National Research Center of Parallel Computer Engineering & Technology (NRCPC) and installed at the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi, drops to number two after leading the list for the past two years. Its HPL mark of 93 petaflops has remained unchanged since it came online in June 2016.

Sierra, a new system at the DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory took the number three spot, delivering 71.6 petaflops on HPL. Built by IBM, Sierra’s architecture is quite similar to that of Summit, with each of its 4,320 nodes powered by two Power9 CPUs plus four NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs and using the same Mellanox EDR InfiniBand as the system interconnect.

Tianhe-2A, also known as Milky Way-2A, moved down two notches into the number four spot, despite receiving a major upgrade that replaced its five-year-old Xeon Phi accelerators with custom-built Matrix-2000 coprocessors. The new hardware increased the system’s HPL performance from 33.9 petaflops to 61.4 petaflops, while bumping up its power consumption by less than four percent. Tianhe-2A was developed by China’s National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) and is installed at the National Supercomputer Center in Guangzhou, China.

The new AI Bridging Cloud Infrastructure (ABCI) is the fifth-ranked system on the list, with an HPL mark of 19.9 petaflops. The Fujitsu-built supercomputer is powered by 20-core Xeon Gold processors along with NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs. It’s installed in Japan at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST).

Piz Daint (19.6 petaflops), Titan (17.6 petaflops), Sequoia (17.2 petaflops), Trinity (14.1 petaflops), and Cori (14.0 petaflops) move down to the number six through 10 spots, respectively.

TOP 10 Sites for June 2018

For more information about the sites and systems in the list, click on the links or view the complete list.

Rank System Cores Rmax (TFlop/s) Rpeak (TFlop/s) Power (kW)
1 Summit - IBM Power System AC922, IBM POWER9 22C 3.07GHz, NVIDIA Volta GV100, Dual-rail Mellanox EDR Infiniband, IBM
DOE/SC/Oak Ridge National Laboratory
United States
2,282,544 122,300.00 187,659.27 8,806
2 Sunway TaihuLight - Sunway MPP, Sunway SW26010 260C 1.45GHz, Sunway, NRCPC
National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi
China
10,649,600 93,014.59 125,435.90 15,371
3 Sierra - IBM Power System S922LC, IBM POWER9 22C 3.1GHz, NVIDIA Volta GV100, Dual-rail Mellanox EDR Infiniband, IBM / NVIDIA / Mellanox
DOE/NNSA/LLNL
United States
1,572,480 71,610.00 119,193.60
4 Tianhe-2A - TH-IVB-FEP Cluster, Intel Xeon E5-2692v2 12C 2.2GHz, TH Express-2, Matrix-2000, NUDT
National Super Computer Center in Guangzhou
China
4,981,760 61,444.50 100,678.66 18,482
5 AI Bridging Cloud Infrastructure (ABCI) - PRIMERGY CX2550 M4, Xeon Gold 6148 20C 2.4GHz, NVIDIA Tesla V100 SXM2, Infiniband EDR, Fujitsu
National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST)
Japan
391,680 19,880.00 32,576.63 1,649
6 Piz Daint - Cray XC50, Xeon E5-2690v3 12C 2.6GHz, Aries interconnect , NVIDIA Tesla P100, Cray/HPE
Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS)
Switzerland
361,760 19,590.00 25,326.26 2,272
7 Titan - Cray XK7, Opteron 6274 16C 2.200GHz, Cray Gemini interconnect, NVIDIA K20x, Cray/HPE
DOE/SC/Oak Ridge National Laboratory
United States
560,640 17,590.00 27,112.55 8,209
8 Sequoia - BlueGene/Q, Power BQC 16C 1.60 GHz, Custom, IBM
DOE/NNSA/LLNL
United States
1,572,864 17,173.22 20,132.66 7,890
9 Trinity - Cray XC40, Intel Xeon Phi 7250 68C 1.4GHz, Aries interconnect , Cray/HPE
DOE/NNSA/LANL/SNL
United States
979,968 14,137.30 43,902.57 3,844
10 Cori - Cray XC40, Intel Xeon Phi 7250 68C 1.4GHz, Aries interconnect , Cray/HPE
DOE/SC/LBNL/NERSC
United States
622,336 14,014.70 27,880.65 3,939