The king is dead, long live the king! ... or key takeaways from the 55th TOP500 list

The new TOP500 list of the fastest supercomputer was announced. I expected many things, but also have to admin that some things came as a surprise. Congratulation to Fujitsu, the entire Riken team and Japan to push an Arm-based system to the pole position of the new TOP500 list.

My key takeaways are:

• The first supercomputer, which can already be called an exascale system, does not come from China or the USA. It is from Japan and used the Arm architecture!
• The Japanese supercomputer tops the new 55th TOP500 list of supercomputers with 415 PFLOPS by using Arm-based processor.
• The Japanese supercomputer is so powerful that it also scored number 1 on the HPCG and HPL-AI list.
• The application requirements of OpenFoam, SPECFEM3D and WRF influence the design of the Japanese supercomputer strongly.
• The company "Preferred Networks" has developed a highly efficient matrix accelerator (MAU), which reaches 21.1 GFLOPS/Watt by using PCIe adapters combines with low-power Intel Xeon CPUs. This system leads to the number 1 position on the Green 500 list, just ahead of NVIDIA.
• China has with 226 by far the most systems in the new list, ahead of the USA with 114 and Japan with 29. France follows this with 19, Germany with 16 and the Netherlands with 15.
• In terms of performance, the USA continues to lead with 639 PFLOPS, followed by China with 566 PFLOPS and Japan with 528 PFLOPS.
• Among manufacturers, Chinese vendors are dominating. Lenovo has 180 systems, Sugon has 68 systems, and Inspur has 64 systems.
• Overall, the total performance of the list has increased significantly by 35 per cent to 2.22 EFLOPS—previously it was only 5.5 per cent increase.
• China continues to have a significant footprint in commercial systems on the new TOP500 list, which is 78% of commercial systems that represents 52% of the performance of all commercial systems.