The International Supercomputing Conference (June 16-20, Frankfurt, Germany) brought interesting news concerning this strategically important industry, while the 2019 Symposia on VLSI Technology and Circuits (Kyoto, Japan, June 9-14) is one of the sources of several announcements on memory technologies this week. Plus, R&D achievements in car battery technologies and a preview from the upcoming sensor events (Sensor+Test in Nuremberg and Sensors Expo in San Jose, CA, both from 25 to 27 June).

World supercomputer ranking, Nvidia role, and a new challenger

The new edition of the TOP500 supercomputer list is a source of extremely interesting information. For the first time, all 500 systems listed deliver a petaflop or more on the High Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark. Two IBM-built supercomputers, Summit and Sierra – installed at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, respectively – retain the first two positions on the list, with the Summit system delivering a record 148.6 petaflops. China now claims 291 out of 500 systems, followed by the United States with 116. Japan is in third place with 29 systems, followed by France with 19, the United Kingdom with 18, and Germany with 14. The US, however, still maintain their lead in overall HPL capacity, with 38.4 percent of the aggregate list performance. Chinese supercomputer vendors now have the largest share in the list, with Lenovo claiming 173 systems, followed by Inspur with 71, and Sugon with 63. From a processor perspective, Intel continues to dominate the TOP500 list, with the company’s chips appearing in 95.6 percent of all systems. IBM Power CPUs are in seven systems, followed by AMD processors, which are present in three systems. A single supercomputer on the list, Astra, is powered by Arm processors. A total of 133 systems on the TOP500 list employ accelerator or coprocessor technology, down slightly from 138 six months ago. Of these, 125 systems use NVIDIA GPUs.

The International Supercomputing Conference. Image credit: Prometeus GmbH