Supercomputers Getting Faster – At Faster Rate

The list of the world’s top supercomputers reveals what data transfer and storage technologies are leading the way toward greater speed. Drew Robb reports.

My laptop didn’t make the latest edition of the Top500.org’s list of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. But 25 years ago, it might have. Such is the speed of advancement in the computing field that last year’s top dog is this year’s also ran.

“The first petaflop system (quadrillions of calculations per second) was Roadrunner at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories based on IBM BladeCenter,” said Dan Olds, principal at Gabriel Consulting Group. “From No. 1 18 months ago, it is now in 7th place.”

In the past six months, the entry level to make it onto the list jumped to 31.1 teraflop/s (trillions of calculations per second) from 24.7 Tflop/s. No. 305 from June has fallen all the way to 500. So it will be interesting to see how long the brand new No. 1 — the Chinese Tianhe-1A system — can hold onto its lead.

Tianhe-1A is stationed at the National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin, where it achieved a performance level of 2.57 petaflop/s, running the running Linpack benchmark application used to determine the Top500. With 29376 GB of memory, it is based on Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs) as well as Intel Xeon 5600 series processors.

Read the rest at ServerWatch.

RELATED NEWS AND ANALYSIS

• Ethics and Artificial Intelligence: Driving Greater Equality

  FEATURE |  By James Maguire,
  December 16, 2020

• AI vs. Machine Learning vs. Deep Learning

  FEATURE |  By Cynthia Harvey,
  December 11, 2020

• Huawei’s AI Update: Things Are Moving Faster Than We Think

  FEATURE |  By Rob Enderle,
  December 04, 2020

• Keeping Machine Learning Algorithms Honest in the ‘Ethics-First’ Era

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Guest Author,
  November 18, 2020

• Key Trends in Chatbots and RPA

  FEATURE |  By Guest Author,
  November 10, 2020

• Top 10 AIOps Companies

  FEATURE |  By Samuel Greengard,
  November 05, 2020

• What is Text Analysis?

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Guest Author,
  November 02, 2020

• How Intel’s Work With Autonomous Cars Could Redefine General Purpose AI

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Rob Enderle,
  October 29, 2020

• Dell Technologies World: Weaving Together Human And Machine Interaction For AI And Robotics

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Rob Enderle,
  October 23, 2020

• The Super Moderator, or How IBM Project Debater Could Save Social Media

  FEATURE |  By Rob Enderle,
  October 16, 2020

• Top 10 Chatbot Platforms

  FEATURE |  By Cynthia Harvey,
  October 07, 2020

• Finding a Career Path in AI

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Guest Author,
  October 05, 2020

• CIOs Discuss the Promise of AI and Data Science

  FEATURE |  By Guest Author,
  September 25, 2020

• Microsoft Is Building An AI Product That Could Predict The Future

  FEATURE |  By Rob Enderle,
  September 25, 2020

• Top 10 Machine Learning Companies 2021

  FEATURE |  By Cynthia Harvey,
  September 22, 2020

• NVIDIA and ARM: Massively Changing The AI Landscape

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Rob Enderle,
  September 18, 2020

• Continuous Intelligence: Expert Discussion [Video and Podcast]

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By James Maguire,
  September 14, 2020

• Artificial Intelligence: Governance and Ethics [Video]

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By James Maguire,
  September 13, 2020

• IBM Watson At The US Open: Showcasing The Power Of A Mature Enterprise-Class AI

  FEATURE |  By Rob Enderle,
  September 11, 2020

• Artificial Intelligence: Perception vs. Reality

  FEATURE |  By James Maguire,
  September 09, 2020