Who Tops the List of Fastest Supercomputers?

The new Top500 list of the fastest supercomputers was released at the ISC High Performance 2024 conference in Hamburg, Germany, May 12-16. The event focuses on high-performance computing, machine learning, data analytics and quantum computing.

LUMI (Large Unified Modern Infrastructure), the flagship supercomputer of the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU), remains the most powerful supercomputer in Europe. LUMI is hosted at CSC’s data center in Kajaani, Finland. The LUMI consortium includes Finland, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Iceland, Norway, Poland, Sweden and Switzerland. The word “Lumi” means “snow” in Finnish. The LUMI system is provided by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and is based on an HPE Cray EX supercomputer.

LUMI achieved a High-Performance Linpack (HPL) performance of 379.7 petaflops. Worldwide, LUMI ranked 5th on the Top500 list. The Frontier supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, TN, USA, once again topped the list with an HPL score of 1.206 EFlop/s.

The only new system to make it into the top 10 is the Alps machine at rank 6 from the Swiss National Supercomputing Center (CSCS). This system achieved an HPL score of 270 PFlop/s. Ranks 1, 2, 3, 9 and 10 are occupied by supercomputers from the USA, rank 4 by a supercomputer from Japan, rank 6 by Alps from Switzerland, rank 7 by a supercomputer Italy and rank 8 by one from Spain. The fastest supercomputer from China is Sunway TaihuLight in 13th place, from Saudi Arabia Shaheen III CPU in 13th place, from South Korea Sejong in 25th place and from Australia Setonix GPU in 28th place.

This is the fifth time LUMI has been included in the bi-annual Top500 list. Both academic and industrial users have used LUMI’s computing power to make advances in areas such as large language models, digital twins, and quantum technologies. In keeping with LUMI’s status as one of the world’s most advanced platforms for AI, more than half of LUMI’s capacity has been dedicated to AI-related research and innovation.

Several other new benchmark lists were published at ISC24. For example, LUMI was ranked number three in the HPL-MxP benchmark with a performance of 2,350 exaflops. The HPL-MxP benchmark tests system capability for converged high performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI) workloads, which was one of LUMI’s design goals. LUMI ranked fourth on the new High-Performance Conjugate Gradient (HPCG) list with a score of 4,587 pflop/s. The HPCG benchmark provides an alternative metric for evaluating supercomputer performance from the perspective of applications tied to memory bandwidth and is intended to complement the HPL measurement. The LUMI supercomputer was ranked twelfth on the new Green500 list, which ranks the Top500 supercomputers by energy efficiency every two years. LUMI’s GFlops/watt ratio is 53.4, making it one of the greenest supercomputers in the world.