India's largest supercomputer PARAM Siddhi-AI had made headline last year for being inducted as the 62nd rank holder in the list of most powerful supercomputers in the world. This ranking of the most powerful non-distributed computer systems in the world is released by the biannual Top500 list, the 56th edition of which was released in November 2020. To find a place on this list is no mean feat; to give you an idea of how powerful these computers are: the aggregate performance of all 500 is 2.43 exaflops on the latest list. But which are the top 10 position holders on this list? Here's a compilation:

• Fugaku: The Japanese system is the fastest performing supercomputer of the world with an Arm A64FX capacity of 7,630,848 cores. Thanks to additional hardware, Fugaku grew its HPL performance to 442 petaflops since its debut in June 2020 (This puts it three times ahead of the number two system in the list). Fugaku was constructed by Fujitsu and is installed at the RIKEN Center for Computational Science (R-CCS) in Kobe, Japan.
• Summit: This IBM-built system at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee remains the fastest system in the US with a performance of 148.8 petaflops. Summit has 4,356 nodes, each one housing two 22-core Power9 CPUs and six NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs.
• Sierra: This system, at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, has an HPL mark of 94.6 petaflops. Its architecture is very similar to that of Summit, with each of its 4,320 nodes equipped with two Power9 CPUs and four NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs.
• Sunway TaihuLight: This system is developed by China’s National Research Center of Parallel Computer Engineering & Technology (NRCPC) and installed at the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi. It is powered exclusively by Sunway SW26010 processors and achieves 93 petaflops on HPL.
• Selene: This NVIDIA DGX A100 SuperPOD is installed in-house at NVIDIA Corp. It was listed as number seven in June but has doubled in size, allowing it to move up to the fifth position. The system is based on AMD EPYC processors with NVIDIA’s new A100 GPUs for acceleration. Selene achieved 63.4 petaflops on HPL as a result of the upgrade.
• Tianhe-2A: Also known as the Milky Way-2A, this system is developed by China’s National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) and deployed at the National Supercomputer Center in Guangzho. It is powered by Intel Xeon CPUs and NUDT’s Matrix-2000 DSP accelerators and achieves 61.4 petaflops on HPL.
• JUWELS Booster Module: A debutante on the list, the Atos-built BullSequana machine was recently installed at the Forschungszentrum Jülich (FZJ) in Germany. It is part of a modular system architecture. These modules are integrated by using the ParTec Modulo Cluster Software Suite. The Booster Module uses AMD EPYC processors with NVIDIA A100 GPUs for acceleration similar to the fifth-ranked Selene system. Running by itself the JUWELS Booster Module was able to achieve 44.1 HPL petaflops, which makes it the most powerful system in Europe.
• HPC5: A Dell PowerEdge system, it is installed by the Italian company Eni S.p.A. It achieves a performance of 35.5 petaflops using Intel Xeon Gold CPUs and NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs. It is the most powerful system in the list used for commercial purposes at a customer site.
• Frontera: A Dell C6420 system, it was installed at the Texas Advanced Computing Center of the University of Texas in 2019. It achieves 23.5 petaflops using 448,448 of its Intel Platinum Xeon cores.
• Dammam-7: A new supercomputer, it is installed at Saudi Aramco in Saudi Arabia and is the second commercial supercomputer in the current top 10. The HPE Cray CS-Storm systems uses Intel Gold Xeon CPUs and NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs. It reached 22.4 petaflops on the HPL benchmark.

The complete listing by Top500 can be accessed here.

Image from Flickr