Top500 November 2024: El Capitan leads the US fleet with 1.7 ExaFLOPS 13 comments
Image: HPE
The United States secures even more dominance in the Top500 with new leader El Capitan (details) with its whopping 1.74 ExaFLOPS. Europe can at least get fifth place with Italian newcomer HPC6. There is still no new Chinese competition. AMD and Nvidia gain in chip suppliers, Intel loses.
El Capitan as new peak of the Top500
The world’s fastest supercomputer, El Capitan, is at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in northern California, which is responsible for, among other things, nuclear weapons research. There are 44,544 AMD Instinct MI300A type APUs spread across 11,136 nodes, which make up the majority of the total of 11,039,616 cores and also the computing power of a whopping 1,742 PetaFLOPS or the equivalent of 1,742 ExaFLOPS.
Techconseil has dedicated a separate article to AMD and HPE’s flagship project which goes into more detail:
El Capitan takes over: AMD’s flagship with 44,544 APUs MI300A sinks Intel’s Aurora
Top 10 newcomers
With 1st place, 5th place and 10th place, the three newcomers are distributed very evenly in the top 10. Everything essential has already been said about El Capitan above.
The new number 5 in the world ranking comes from Italy and is now the fastest system in Europe. It’s called HPC6 and reaches 477.90 PetaFLOPS, a value that would have been enough for first place in 2021 before Frontier ushers in the ExaFLOPS era in June 2022.
Like Frontier, the data center operated by Italian energy company Eni is based on the HPE Cray EX235a and combines third-generation Epyc processors with AMD Instinct MI250X accelerator cards. It has a total of 3,143,520 cores and requires around 8,460 kilowatts.
The new tenth place is occupied by the American Tuolumne system with 208.10 PetaFLOPS from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. As with the flagship El Capitan, the new HPE Cray EX255a racks are used here, which combine Epyc Genoa processors with APUs from the Instinct MI300A series. Instead of El Capitan’s approximately 11 million cores, there are “only” 1,161,216. Power consumption is estimated at around 3,387 kilowatts.
Top 10 Fastest Supercomputers According to Top500.org Ranking (Previous) System Location Computing Power (Rmax) Processors Top500 Record 1 (-) El Capitan USA 1,742.00 PetaFLOPS AMD Epyc 4th Gen (24C, 1.8 GHz)
AMD Instinct MI300A November 2024 2 (1) Frontier USA 1,353.00 PetaFLOPS AMD Epyc 3rd Gen (64C, 2.0 GHz)
AMD Instinct MI250X June 2022 3 (2) Aurora USA 1,012.00 PetaFLOPS Intel Xeon Max 9470 (52C, 2.4 GHz)
Intel GPU Max 1550 (?) November 2023 4 (3) Eagle USA 561.20 PetaFLOPS Intel Xeon Platinum 8480C (48C, 2.0 GHz)
Nvidia H100 November 2023 5 (-) HPC6 Italian 477.90 PetaFLOPS AMD Epyc 3rd generation (64C, 2.0 GHz)
AMD Instinct MI250X November 2024 6 (4) Fugaku Japan 442.01 PetaFLOPS Fujitsu A64FX (48C, 2.2 GHz) June 2020 7 (6) Alps Schweiz 434.90 PetaFLOPS Nvidia Grace (72C, 3.1 GHz)
Nvidia GH200 June 2024 8 (5) LUMI Finland 379.70 PetaFLOPS AMD Epyc 3rd Gen (64C, 2.0 GHz)
AMD Instinct MI250X June 2022 9 (6) Leonardo Italian 241.20 PetaFLOPS Intel Xeon Platinum 8358 (32C, 2.6 GHz)
Nvidia A100 November 2022 10 (-) Tuolumne USA 208.10 PetaFLOPS AMD Epyc 4th generation (24C, 1.8 GHz)
AMD Instinct MI300A November 2024 Changes from last listing highlighted in bold
Updates for Frontier and Alps
The American Frontier system consolidated its second place with a new expansion that increased its peak performance from 1,206 to 1,353 PetaFLOPS. Intel’s Aurora remains unchanged at 1,012 petaFLOPS in third place.
Despite the massive upgrade from 270 PetaFLOPS to 434.90 PetaFLOPS, Swiss supercomputer Alps cannot improve in the rankings. He even lost a place and is now in 7th place ahead of the Finnish LUMI.
Nations: China will soon be out
The United States has four more systems than in the summer, bringing the number to 173. Thanks in large part to El Capitan, the combined computing power has increased significantly and now exceeds 6.5 ExaFLOPS.
New systems have not been imported from China for a long time. As older systems are replaced by faster ones, the number of Chinese supercomputers in the top 500 continues to decline. While there were 80 in June, there are only 63 today. However, it can be assumed that China now also has systems of the ExaFLOPS class, as experts already predicted a few years ago.
Countries with the most systems Rank Nation Systems Rmax (TFLOPS, combined) 1 United States 173 (+4) 6,517,059 2 China 63 (-17) 319,062 3 Germany 41 (+1) 405 341 4 Japan 34 (+ 5) 926 550 5 France 24 (unchanged) 298 086
Germany can maintain third place in terms of the number of supercomputers in the top 500 and now has 41 systems with one new addition. Japan now has five more systems than in the previous edition and follows in fourth place with 34 supercomputers. Thanks to the top 10 Fugaku computers, the combined computing power is more than twice that of German systems. France again occupies fifth place with an unchanged number of units, but was able to significantly increase its computing power.
AMD, Intel and NVIDIA
Intel’s downward trend as a processor supplier continues. Instead of 63% six months ago, only 61.8% of the top 500 are equipped with Intel processors. In return, AMD is experiencing further growth: its share increases from 31.2 percent to 32.4 percent.
Only 9 systems, or just under 2%, are equipped with a Fujitsu processor (A64FX). Nvidia Grace is now present on 9 computers and IBM Power9 on only 4 systems.
Nvidia Hopper makes huge gains
There has been a sharp increase in systems equipped with GPU accelerators or coprocessors: with 211 systems now, more than 42% use such a configuration. In May, there were still 195. Of these, only 72 now use the Nvidia Ampere architecture, compared to 84 previously. The number of systems equipped with Nvidia Hopper, however, has almost tripled (60 instead of 22). Nvidia Volta is still present on 33 systems.
The Instinct MI250X series with 12 systems is the most commonly installed AMD accelerator. The younger variant of the APU, Instinct MI300A, now has 5 systems, including the new superstar El Capitan.
Europe dominates the Green500
The Green500 efficiency ranking, ranked by computing power per watt, has also been updated and will be covered separately in a second article on Techconseil.
Green500 supercomputer: Europe shows the United States how efficiency works
Techconseil received information about this article from Top500.org under NDA. The only requirement was the earliest possible publication date.
Topics: AMD research graphics cards Intel artificial intelligence Nvidia processors SC24 supercomputers Economy Top500 Source: Top500
Marc deciphers processors by testing their performance for gaming, content creation, and artificial intelligence.
