Newcomer El Capitan unseated five-time No. 1 system Frontier and is now the third exascale machine in the TOP500 supercomputer rankings. Credit: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory The new El Capitan system at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California made its debut at No. 1 on the latest TOP500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, released today. The Frontier system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee moved down to the No. 2 spot, ceding the top spot it held for the last five rankings. With more than 11 million CPU and GPU cores, El Capitan achieved 1.742 Exaflop/s on the HPL benchmark. It’s based on AMD 4th generation EPYC processors with 24 cores at 1.8GHz and AMD Instinct MI300A accelerators. Frontier achieved an HPL score of 1.353 Exaflop/s. It’s equipped with AMD 3rd generation EPYC 64C 2GHz processors. There are now three Exascale systems leading the TOP500: El Capitan, Frontier, and Aurora, the third-fastest system with a preliminary HPL score of 1.012 Exaflop/s. All three Exascale systems are installed at Department of Energy laboratories in the US. The Eagle system installed on the Microsoft Azure cloud in the US claimed the No. 4 spot and remains the highest-ranked cloud-based system on the TOP500 with an HPL score of 561.2 PFlop/s. At No. 5 is the HPC6 system in Ferrera Erbognone, Italy – it’s now the fastest system in Europe. In this 64th edition of the TOP500, seven of the top 10 systems are manufactured by HPE. In addition, seven of the computers on the top 10 use the Slingshot-11 interconnect, while two use Infiniband and one has its own proprietary interconnect. Here’s a breakdown of specific details for the 10 fastest supercomputer systems on the TOP500 list for November 2024: No. 1: El Capitan Location: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, Calif. HPL score: 1.742 Exaflop/s System model: HPE Cray EX255a Processors: AMD 4th generation EPYC processors with 24 cores at 1.8 GHz and AMD Instinct MI300A accelerators Total core count: 11,039,616 Interconnect: Slingshot 11 Energy efficiency: 58.89 Gigaflops/watt No. 2: Frontier Location: Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tenn. HPL score: 1.353 Exaflop/s System model: HPE Cray EX235a Processors: 3rd Gen AMD EPYC CPUs optimized for HPC and AI with AMD Instinct 250X accelerators Total core count: 9,066,176 Interconnect: Slingshot 11 Energy efficiency: 54.98 Gigaflops/watt No. 3: Aurora Location: Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, Argonne, Ill. HPL score: 1.012 Exaflop/s System model: HPE Cray EX – Intel Exascale Compute Blades Processors: Intel Xeon CPU Max Series processors and Intel Data Center GPU Max Series accelerators Total core count: 9,264,128 Interconnect: Slingshot 11 Energy efficiency: 26.15 Gigaflops/watt No. 4: Eagle Location: Microsoft Azure cluster HPL score: 561 Petaflop/s System model: Microsoft NDv5 Processors: Xeon Platinum 8480C processors and Nvidia H100 accelerators Total core count: 2,073,600 Interconnect: Nvidia Infiniband NDR Energy efficiency: unknown No. 5: HPC6 Location: Eni S.p.A center in Ferrera Erbognone in Italy HPL score: 477.9 Petaflop/s System model: HPE Cray EX235a Processors: 3rd Gen AMD EPYC CPUs optimized for HPC and AI with AMD Instinct MI250X accelerators Total core count: 3,143,520 Interconnect: Slingshot 11 Energy efficiency: 56.48 Gigaflops/watt No. 6: Fugaku Location: RIKEN Center for Computational Science (R-CCS) in Kobe, Japan HPL score: 442 Petaflop/s System model: Supercomputer Fugaku, Fujitsu cluster Processors: A64FX 48C 2.2GHz Total core count: 7,630,848 Interconnect: proprietary Tofu interconnect D Energy efficiency: 15.42 Gigaflops/watt No. 7: Alps Location: Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) in Switzerland HPL score: 434.9 Petaflop/s System model: HPE Cray EX254n Processors: Nvidia Grace 72C 3.1GHz and Nvidia GH200 Superchip Total core count: 2,121,600 Interconnect: Slingshot 11 Energy efficiency: 61.05 Gigaflops/watt No. 8: LUMI Location: EuroHPC center at CSC in Finland HPL score: 380 Petaflop/s System model: HPE Cray EX235a Processors: AMD Optimized 3rd Generation EPYC 64C 2GHz and AMD Instinct MI250X accelerators Total core count: 2,752,704 Interconnect: Slingshot 11 Energy efficiency: 53.43 Gigaflops/watt No. 9: Leonardo Location: EuroHPC site in CINECA, Italy HPL score: 241.2 Petaflop/s System model: Atos BullSequana XH2000 Processors: Xeon Platinum 8358 32C 2.6GHz processors and Nvidia A100 SXM4 64 GB accelerators Total core count: 1,824,768 Interconnect: Quad-rail Nvidia HDR100 Infiniband Energy efficiency: 32.19 Gigaflops/watt No. 10: Tuolumne Location: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Calif. HPL score: 208.1 Petaflop/s System model: HPE Cray EX255a Processors: AMD 4th Gen EPYC 24C 1.8GHz and AMD Instinct MI300A accelerators Total core count: 1,161,216 Interconnect: Slingshot 11 Energy efficiency: 61.45 Gigaflops/watt TOP500 history and highlights The first iteration of the TOP500 list was created for a small conference in Germany in June 1993. The authors decided to continue compiling the list, which is now a twice-yearly event. Some highlights from the November 2024 TOP500 list include: Nvidia accelerators: A total of 211 systems on the list are using accelerator/co-processor technology, up from 194 six months ago. Of these, 72 use Nvidia Ampere chips, 60 use Nvidia Hopper, and 33 systems use Nvidia Volta. Intel vs. AMD: Intel continues to provide the processors for the largest share (61.8%) of TOP500 systems, down from 63% six months ago. Meanwhile, 162 (32.4%) of the systems in the current list use AMD processors, up from 31.2% six months ago. Geographic distribution: The US is home to 173 of the top 500 systems. China has 63, Germany has 41, Japan has 34, and France has 24 systems. Rounding out the countries with the highest numbers of TOP500 systems are the UK (14), South Korea (13), Italy (13), Netherlands (10), Canada (9) and Brazil (9). The TOP500 authors made this observation: “While China and the United States were once again the countries that earned the most entries on the entire TOP500 list, it would appear that China is not participating to the extent that it once did. The United States added two systems to the list, bringing its total number of systems to 173. China once again dropped its number of representative machines on the list from 80 to 63 systems. Like last list, China did not introduce any new machines to the TOP500 list. Germany is quickly catching up to China, with 41 machines on the list.” HPC manufacturers: While six of the top10 systems are manufactured by HPE, Lenovo dominates the full TOP500 list. Lenovo is the manufacturer for 162 systems, followed by HPE with 115. Rounding out the top 10 HPC manufacturers are Eviden (52), Dell (37), Nvidia (26), Fujitsu (15), NEC (14), Inspur (11), Microsoft Azure (8) and Penguin Computing (7). SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER From our editors straight to your inbox Get started by entering your email address below. Please enter a valid email address Subscribe