Supercomputer: El Capitan conquers the top 500

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The highlight of the 64th Top500 list, which was presented at the start of SC24 in Atlanta, is the new leader: the recently completed El Capitan with 1.74 exaflops in the Linpack benchmark. This underlines HPE-Cray's dominance in the Top500 world of supercomputers, especially as seven of the top 10 come from HPE's Cray forge.

Around one million CPU cores and ten million GPU cores are at work in the now fully developed El Capitan. The AMD Instinct MI300A compute accelerators combine the x86 processor cores (Zen 4) with the GPU cores in the form of chiplets; in other words, they are server APUs.

El Capitan is located not too far from the eponymous granite block in Yosemite National Park, namely in California's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). Back in the summer, a first expansion stage with around one hundredth of the power was able to occupy 46th place. This also shows how high up these top systems are, when just one hundredth is enough for this position. At the time, he was on a par with his identical brothers rzAdams and Tuolumne, who are also at home in the LLNL. RzAdams, meanwhile, has remained unchanged (now in 49th place), but Tuolumne has been upgraded mightily to 208 PFlops (10th place).

While the Frontier system at Oak Ridge National Lab (1.35 EFlops, also from HPE-Cray), which has now been pushed into second place, is dedicated to scientific tasks, El Capitan is mainly intended for military research, in particular for the modernization of the nuclear arsenal. Although the computer with its AMD GPUs would be ideal for AI, according to Bronis de Supinski, chief technologist at the LLNL, this does not play a major role, as it is mainly classical simulations that are required here. He also reported that hardly any work has been put into optimizing the Linpack benchmark; with a theoretical peak performance of 2.75 EFlops, there is still plenty of room for improvement.

Frontier is followed by – also from HPE-Cray – the Aurora system with Intel hardware and 1.01 EFlops, which is many years late. However, with its more than mediocre energy efficiency (at 26 GFlops/Watt less than half of the first two), it cannot really shine.

The first non-HPE computer on the list is Microsoft's Azure system "Eagle" in 4th place with 561 PFlops, equipped with Intel Xeon Platinum and Nvidia H100.

Europe well in the race

Three of the seven HPE systems mentioned at the beginning are in Europe: the HPC6 at ENI in Italy is a newcomer in fifth place with 478 PFlops. It now takes the top position in Europe ahead of the Alps of the Swiss Supercomputer Center (CSCS), which has been expanded even further and is now in seventh place with 435 PFlops. Unlike its colleagues, it is equipped with Nvidia Grace.

In between is the somewhat aged Fugaku in Japan, which achieves 442 PFlops with its A64FX ARM processors. It topped the Top500 list for two years from summer 2020.

The following Euro HPC computer, LUMI, located in Finland, is also an HPE Cray system with 380 PFlops. And Europe also has another Euro HPC computer in the top ten, the Italian Leonardo, in ninth place with 241 PFlops. However, this was built by a European forma, Eviden, formerly Bull.

Eviden has also installed other Euro-HPC systems, such as Marenostrum 5 ACC in Barcelona (175 PFlops, 11th place) and, together with ParTec, Germany's currently fastest computer, the Jedi Jupiter in Jülich (83 PFlops, 18th place), which is equipped with Nvidia Grace.

Even though the USA is at the top with 172 systems (with 6.5 EFlops), Europe – i.e. the EU plus Switzerland, Norway, Iceland and the UK, but excluding Russia – is doing quite well with 157 systems (3.1 EFlops).

In addition to Eviden as a manufacturer, the medium-sized company Megware from Chemnitz, which has a total of eight computers at German universities in the current list, including three new ones: Capella in Dresden (AMD Epyc, Nvidia H100, 24 PFlops, 51st place), Helma in Erlangen (AMD Epyc, Nvidia H100, 17 PFlops, 79th place) and Grete Phase 3 in Göttingen (Xeon Platinum, Nvidia H100, 3.6 PFlops, 266th place). Overall, Germany leads in Europe with 41 ranked systems, ahead of France (24) and the UK (14). But the really strong European computers are in Italy, Finland and Switzerland.

64. Top500-Liste der Supercomputer: Top-10
Rang	Name	Land	CPU-Typ	Beschleuniger	RMax	Effizienz
1	El Capitan	USA	MI300A	AMD MI300A	1742 PFlops	58,9 GFlops/W
2	Frontier	USA	Epyc	AMD MI 250X	1206 PFlops	55,0 GFlops/W
3	Aurora	USA	Xeon	Xeon GPU Max	1012 PFlops	26,2 GFlops/W
4	Eagle (MS Azure)	USA	Xeon	Nvidia H100	561 PFlops	k.A.
5	Eni HPC6	Italien	Epyc	Instinct MI 250X	478 PFlops	56,5 GFlops/W
6	Fugaku	Japan	A64FX	–	442 PFlops	15,4 GFlops/W
7	Alps	Schweiz	GH200	Nvidia GH200	435 PFlops	61,1 GFlops/W
8	LUMI	Finnland	Epyc	Instinct MI 250X	380 PFlops	53,4 GFlops/W
9	Leonardo	Italien	Xeon	Nvidia A100	241 PFlops	32,2 GFlops/W
10	Tuolumne	USA	MI300A	AMD MI300A	208 PFlops	61,5 GFlops/W