AMD-Powered Frontier Remains Fastest Supercomputer in the World

The Top500 organization released its semi-annual list of the fastest supercomputers in the world, with the AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer retaining its spot at the top of the list with 1.194 Exaflop/s (EFlop/s) of performance, fending off a half-scale 585.34 Petaflop/s (PFlop/s) submission from the Argonne National Laboratory's Intel-powered Aurora supercomputer. From a report: Argonne's submission, which only employs half of the Aurora system, lands at the second spot on the Top500, unseating Japan's Fugaku as the second-fastest supercomputer in the world. Intel also made inroads with 20 new supercomputers based on its Sapphire Rapids CPUs entering the list, but AMD's EPYC continues to take over the Top500 as it now powers 140 systems on the list -- a 39% year-over-year increase.

Intel and Argonne are currently still working to bring Arora fully online for users in 2024. As such, the Aurora submission represented 10,624 Intel CPUs and 31,874 Intel GPUs working in concert to deliver 585.34 PFlop/s at a total of 24.69 megawatts (MW) of energy. In contrast, AMD's Frontier holds the performance title at 1.194 EFlop/s, which is more than twice the performance of Aurora, while consuming a comparably miserly 22.70 MW of energy (yes, that's less power for the full Frontier supercomputer than half of the Aurora system). Aurora did not land on the Green500, a list of the most power-efficient supercomputers, with this submission, but Frontier continues to hold eighth place on that list. However, Aurora is expected to eventually reach up to 2 EFlop/s of performance when it comes fully online. When complete, Auroroa will have 21,248 Xeon Max CPUs and 63,744 Max Series 'Ponte Vecchio' GPUs spread across 166 racks and 10,624 compute blades, making it the largest known single deployment of GPUs in the world. The system leverages HPE Cray EX â" Intel Exascale Compute Blades and uses HPE's Slingshot-11 networking interconnect.

AMD Soars, Intel Snores

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AMD's Frontier is so fast, it finished calculating the meaning of life, the universe, and everything before Intel's Aurora could even boot up. Rumor has it that Frontier was also spotted helping Skynet with its vacation plans. Meanwhile, Aurora's still trying to figure out if it left the oven on. But let's not be too harsh – after all, every time Aurora lags, an IT admin gets their wings!

Re:

[alvinrod]

AMD's Frontier is so powerful it's counted backwards from infinity to zero. Twice.

Re: AMD Soars, Intel Snores

[sg_oneill]

Which is all good and fine, but it doesn't answer the most pressing question;- Does it run Crysis*

*I suppose on 2023 the modern version of that joke would be something like "does it run cyberpunk 2077 on Mac settings"..... now imagine a Beowulf cluster of these.... Operated by Natalie Portman (with hot grits in her pants)

Re:

[sinkskinkshrieks]

But what is the question?

Great!

[muh_freeze_peach]

They should try making a GPU sometime.

Re:

[Junta]

Note, this is mostly on the backbone of their GPU. The Instinct MI-250X.

Re: Great!

[BadgerStork]

Intel makes GPU both integrated and on a card

Yeah, but what do they DO.

[geekmux]

Is it just me, or does it seem that billions are invested in the global effort to create the biggest baddest super-de-duper-puter ever, and yet we hardly ever see any articles about what they actually DO with these systems after they've secured a spot anywhere on THE list??

Yeah. I'm asking seriously. Forget Top500. Tell me what even the Top25 do to justify their existence. Other than dick-measuring I mean. I'd hate to assume we humans do all this shit for the 'Gram. Like 99.9% of every customer base, I've never shopped for a processor based on supercomputer marketing.

Re: Yeah, but what do they DO.

[godrik]

all kind of science, from material science, to nuclear power plant design, to astophysics, and drug discovery and weather forecasting.
pretty much all science that happens nowadays either runs on these machines or is inspired by previous runs on these machines.

all the leadership class facilities publish report on what science they support.

Re:

[dskoll]

A flop is not a dick-measuring unit.

But seriously... supercomputers are used for any, well, computation-intensive task. Weather forecasting, physics simulations, molecular modeling, etc.

Re:

[Pascoea]

A flop is not a dick-measuring unit.

No, probably not. But a "thud" is, and that's usually generated by a flop on to a hard surface.

Long story short

[sabian2008]

Simulations of physical and biological systems (including defense) and AI training.

Re:Yeah, but what do they DO.

[ebunga]

Most of the top US systems are for nuclear physics, followed by weather and climate modeling. Outside of the machines dealing with highly classified junk, it's not that difficult to get a little time on many of these systems. Haven't checked recently, but at one time the barrier to entry at ORNL was "fill out this form".

Re:Yeah, but what do they DO.

[fahrbot-bot]

climate modeling

In future news: Supercomputer models determine that climate change driven by heat from supercomputers studying climate change.

Re:

[ArchieBunker]

Weather simulations are difficult so I'll give you an analogy. Toss a few grains of rice in a hot tub. Now predict their position after a week of circulating.

Re:

[Yo,dog!]

Nuclear warhead design

Re: Yeah, but what do they DO.

[Chess_the_cat]

NSA code breaking, nuclear physics and simulations, and other stuff that they arenâ(TM)t going to tell you about.

Re:

[ArchieBunker]

Is it just me, or does it seem that billions are invested in the global effort to create the biggest baddest super-de-duper-puter ever, and yet we hardly ever see any articles about what they actually DO with these systems after they've secured a spot anywhere on THE list??

Yes, governments and research groups spent millions on a list so it can generate 12 (as of now) slashdot posts.

Yeah. I'm asking seriously. Forget Top500. Tell me what even the Top25 do to justify their existence. Other than dick-measuring I mean. I'd hate to assume we humans do all this shit for the 'Gram. Like 99.9% of every customer base, I've never shopped for a processor based on supercomputer marketing.

I'm pretty sure you grew up in the leaded gasoline era.

Re:

[Narcocide]

Yea, I get it, you want to see the simulation renderings in action. That's hard to come by outside of specialized research circles, but I've got a good one for you; watch "How the Universe Works [imdb.com]" (How the Universe Works [wikipedia.org]) and keep an eye out for the high-res renderings of deep space objects doing stuff violently.

Re:

[Narcocide]

As a follow-up to this: I'm completely serious here. If you watch this in HD with just enough interest in astrophysics to know how difficult these events would be to simulate and how impossible it would be to actually film them up close, you won't be disappointed.

Re:

[thegarbz]

Is it just me, or does it seem that billions are invested in the global effort to create the biggest baddest super-de-duper-puter ever, and yet we hardly ever see any articles about what they actually DO with these systems after they've secured a spot anywhere on THE list??

You see constant articles about the results they calculate. You just assume that something as complex as global weather patterns, climate modelling, protein folding, tectonic plate modelling, etc is run on someone's laptop.

But the question as to what they owners do with the supercomputer: They rent out its time to whomever wants to pay for some processing power.