The Titan supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory is pictured above. (Photo by ORNL/U.S. Department of Energy)
China has passed the United States in the total number of top ranked supercomputers, and Titan at Oak Ridge National Laboratory has dropped from fourth to fifth on the TOP500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers.
The TOP500 list is released twice a year, once in June and once in November. It is based on a benchmark test known as Linpack.
Titan at ORNL dropped from third to fourth in June, bumped from the number three spot by the upgraded Piz Daint, a Cray XC50 system installed at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre. Titan is capable of 17.59 petaflops. A petaflop is one quadrillion calculations per second. That’s 1,000 trillion calculations per second. Piz Daint is capable of 19.59 petaflops.
That power is useful in scientific research. At ORNL, Titan is used for research in areas such as materials science, nuclear energy, combustion, and climate science. ORNL is a U.S. Department of Energy laboratory.
Titan slipped one more spot in this month’s list, from fourth to fifth. It was displaced by the upgraded Gyoukou supercomputer. That is a ZettaScaler-2.2 system capable of 19.14 petaflops and deployed at Japan’s Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, the home of the Earth Simulator.
The TOP500 list released Monday has China overtaking the United States in the total number of ranked systems by a margin of 202 to 143. It is the largest number of supercomputers China has ever claimed on the TOP500 ranking, with the U.S. presence shrinking to its lowest level since the list’s inception 25 years ago, a press release said.
Just six months ago, the United States led with 169 systems, with China coming in at 160, the press release said.
“Despite the reversal of fortunes, the 145 systems claimed by the U.S. gives them a solid second-place finish, with Japan in third place with 35, followed by Germany with 20, France with 18, and the United Kingdom with 15,” the release said.
China has also overtaken the US in aggregate performance. The Asian superpower now claims 35.4 percent of the TOP500 flops, with the United States in second place with 29.6 percent, the press release said.
China continues to have the two most powerful supercomputers, Sunway TaihuLight and Tianhe-2 (Milky Way-2).
In June 2016, ORNL officials said a new 200-petaflop supercomputer will succeed Titan, and it could be available to scientists and researchers in 2018. The new IBM supercomputer, named Summit, could about double the computing power of Sunway TaihuLight.
In August, ORNL said Summit, located in a new data center next to Titan, will be the world’s smartest supercomputer. It will be 5-10 times faster than Titan, ORNL said. It will move data five to 10 times faster, store eight times more data, and perform many more calculations simultaneously than Titan, the lab said.
Summit will be the world’s smartest supercomputer because of its enormous memory and data handling capabilities as well as its unique machine learning processor design, according to ORNL. The first cabinets arrived in August at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility at ORNL.
In the latest TOP500 rankings, the top 10 systems remain largely unchanged since June, with a couple of notable exceptions, the TOP500 press release said.
The Sunway TaihuLight system in China maintains its number one ranking for the fourth time. TaihuLight is a system developed by China’s National Research Center of Parallel Computer Engineering and Technology, and it is installed at the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi. It has a High Performance Linpack mark of 93.01 petaflops.
TaihuLight is “far and away the most powerful number-cruncher on the planet,” the TOP500 list said in June.
Tianhe-2 (Milky Way-2), the number two system, was developed by China’s National University of Defense Technology and deployed at the National Supercomputer Center in Guangzho, China. It is still the number two system at 33.86 petaflops. Tianhe-2 was the number one system in the TOP500 list for three consecutive years, until TaihuLight eclipsed it in June 2016.
Piz Daint, the Cray system in Lugano, Switzerland, maintains its number three position with 19.59 petaflops, reaffirming its status as the most powerful supercomputer in Europe, the press release said. Piz Daint was upgraded last year with NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPUs (graphics processing units), which more than doubled its High Performance Linpack (HPL) performance of 9.77 petaflops.
The new number four system is the upgraded Gyoukou supercomputer in Japan. Gyoukou was able to achieve a result of 19.14 petaflops, using PEZY-SC2 accelerators, along with conventional Intel Xeon processors, the press release said.
“The system’s 19,860,000 cores represent the highest level of concurrency ever recorded on the TOP500 rankings of supercomputers,” the release said.
Titan, the five-year-old Cray system installed at ORNL and now number five, is still the largest system in the United States. Its 17.59 petaflops are mainly the result of its NVIDIA K20x GPU accelerators, the press release said. Titan’s Linpack mark of 17.6 petaflops has remained constant since it was installed in 2012.
Sequoia, an IBM BlueGene/Q system installed at DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, is the number six system on the list with a mark of 17.17 petaflops. It was deployed in 2011.
The new number seven system is Trinity, a Cray XC40 supercomputer operated by Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories. It was recently upgraded with Intel “Knights Landing” Xeon Phi processors, which propelled it from 8.10 petaflops six months ago to its current high-water mark of 14.14 petaflops, the press release said.
Cori, a Cray XC40 supercomputer, installed at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), is now the eighth fastest supercomputer in the world. Its 1,630 Intel Xeon “Haswell” processor nodes and 9,300 Intel Xeon Phi 7250 nodes yielded an HPL result of 14.01 petaflops, the press release said.
At 13.55 petaflops, Oakforest-PACS, a Fujitsu PRIMERGY CX1640 M1 installed at Joint Center for Advanced High Performance Computing in Japan, is the number nine system. It too is powered by Intel “Knights Landing” Xeon Phi processors.
Fujitsu’s K computer installed at the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science (AICS) in Kobe, Japan, is now the number 10 system at 10.51 petaflops. Its performance is derived from its 88 thousand SPARC64 processor cores linked by Fujitsu’s Tofu interconnect. Despite its 10th-place showing on HPL, the K Computer is the top-ranked system on the High-Performance Conjugate Gradients (HPCG) benchmark, the press release said.
Titan was the top supercomputer for a short time. It was number one in November 2012, but it was bumped to number two behind Tianhe-2 in June 2013. June 2016 was the first time it had been number three. It continued to be ranked number three in November 2016. Piz Daint bumped it to number four in June.
As big as a basketball court, Titan is 10 times faster than Jaguar, the computer system it replaced. Jaguar, which was capable of about 2.5 petaflops, had ranked as the world’s fastest computer in November 2009 and June 2010.
See the TOP500 press release here.
The Titan supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory is pictured above. (Photo by ORNL/U.S. Department of Energy)
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