Summit Tops Top500

The Top500 project has announced the latest list of the fastest supercomputers. The top 10 systems are unchanged since the last list, with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Summit computer holding onto the top spot and Lawrence Livermore Lab’s Sierra computer in second place. Summit and Sierra are both IBM systems with Power9 CPUs and NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs. Summit recorded a speed of 148.6 petaflops on the High Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark. China took spots 3 and 4 with the Sunway TaihuLight system at 93 petaflops and the former champion Tianhe-2A at 61.4 petaflops.

Overall, the aggregate performance for the systems on the list was 1.65 exaflops and the minimum to enter the list was 1.14 petaflops. The share of Chinese systems continues to rise; 227 of the top 500 systems reside in China. The US had the second-most with 118, and Japan was third with 29. See the report at the Top500 website for more on the latest list.