At ISC 2021, the lists of the 500 most energy-efficient and the fastest supercomputers were released. The latter was a major win for AMD, accounting for 9 out of the top-10 positions, with the 64 Core Epyc processor holding the 2nd, 3rd. 5th, 6th, 8th, and 9th spots. In addition to this, the 4th 7th, and 10th positions were also held by 32 core and 24 core Epyc CPUs alongside the Mellanox HDR interconnect and NVIDIA’s A100 accelerator.
The list of the top-500 fastest supercomputers was much more diverse. Fujitsu’s Arm-based A64FX with close to 8 million cores came in with a mammoth power consumption of nearly 30 MW. The second and third spots were held by IBM’s Summit and Sierra supercomputers, both based in the United States. AMD held the fifth and sixth positions, once again alongside NVIDIA’s A100 GPU in the form of HPE’s Perlmutter and NVIDIA’s Selene Supercomputers, respectively.
The former packs 706,304 cores and is used by the NERSC (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) while the latter features a total of 555,520 cores, based out of NVIDIA’s Silicon Valley, Calif. campus.
Overall, while the Research sector, the market share is fairly diverse, the commercial segment is largely dominated by NVIDIA and Intel, with AMD just getting in on the action.
