Linux completely dominates the top 500 in the world's most powerful supercomputers

The latest Top500, the ranking of the 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world, was published on June 17, 2019 at the International Conference on High Performance Computing held in Frankfurt, Germany.

En This new edition you will find that there are 94 new entrants to this new list, including 47 for China and 17 for the United States. The top of the list remains largely unchanged, compared to the previous ranking, with only two new entries in the top 10, one of which is an existing system that has been upgraded and whose power has been increased.

Frontera is the only new supercomputer in the top 10, is in fifth place in this TOP500 with a power of 38 petaflops.

In this new edition of the list We can see that the United States has added seven new machines to the Top500 of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, reinforcing its stay in supercomputing with 116 supercomputers in total and 38,4% of the ranking's computing power.

The distribution of supercomputers is as follows:

• China: 219
• United States: 116
• Japan: 29
• France: 19
• United Kingdom: 18
• Germany: 14
• Ireland: 13
• Netherlands: 13
• Canadá 8
• South Korea: 5
• Italy: 5
• Australia: 5
• Singapore 5
• Switzerland 4
• Saudi Arabia, Brazil, India, South Africa: 3
• Russia, Finland, Sweden, Spain, Taiwan: 2

Supercomputers that lead the Top 500

While China fell from first and second place to third and fourth place since November 2017, but It is still ahead of the US with 219 supercomputers in China. in number compared to 116 in the United States.

Although this part would give as a reference that China has the greatest potential, the thing is different since the United States is the leader of the list taking into account the processing power.

Two supercomputers designed by IBM for the United States are the Summit which has a power of 200 petaflops and the Sierra with a power of 125.7 petaflops, located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, respectively, retain the top two positions.

In third and fourth place From this list are two Chinese supercomputers:

The Sunway TaihuLight, a system developed by the National Center for Research in Parallel Computing Technology (NRCPC) in Wuxi (125.4 petaflops)

And the Tianhe-2 to developed by the University of China National Defense Technology (NUDT) in Guangzhou (100 petaflops).

The general distribution by number of supercomputers in different parts of the world is as follows: 267 supercomputers are in Asia (261 a year ago), 127 in America (131) and 98 in Europe (101), 5 in Oceania and 3 in Africa.

Linux, the preferred system for supercomputers

In the ranking of operating systems used in supercomputers, It should be noted that all the supercomputers in this TOP500 are now operating under a Linux-based operating system, of which there are the following Linux distributions in them:

48.8% (50.8%) do not detail the distribution

27.8% (23.2%) use CentOS

7.6% (9.8%) - Cray Linux

3% (3.6%) - SUSE

4,8% (5%) - RHEL

1.6% (1.4%) - Ubuntu

0.4% (0.4%) - Scientific Linux

Hardware

While talking about the manufacturers that power these supercomputers we can find:

Lenovo is also the largest supplier of supercomputers in this TOP500, since it represents 34.6% of the fleet surveyed by Inspur (14.2%), Sugon (12.6%), HPE (8%) and Cray (7.8%).

While in the heart that powers these supercomputers Intel CPUs leading the way stand out: 95.6%, followed by IBM Power with 2.6%, SPARC64 - 0.8%, in fourth place, 0.4% in AMD only with 0.4%.

The vast majority of them are based on Intel Xeon processors and NVIDIA accelerators.

Here it is worth highlighting one of them, which is in this Top 500, since only the Astra supercomputer comes with an ARM processorWhich is amazing to see a supercomputer powered by this technology that many might think doesn't have what it takes for big jobs.

Finally now the Green 500 ranking is no longer released separately and merges with the Top 500as energy efficiency is now reflected in the top Top 500 rating (LINPACK FLOPS ratio to power consumption in watts is taken into account).