AMD may boast the two fastest supercomputers in the world with El Capitan and Frontier. HPE is also ever-present in the rankings.
Every six months, a Top500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers is compiled. Ever since 2022, AMD has been showing off its Frontier supercomputer at the top of the list, much to Intel’s frustration. This ranking has a new number one, but it also comes from AMD’s stable.
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AMD’s new champion is called El Capitan. This supercomputer did not steal its name: the system comes with nearly 45,000 AMD MI300A accelerators and totals more than eleven million cores. El Capitan has a theoretical peak of 2.7 exaflops. In practice, it already reached a peak of 1.7 exaflops, surpassing Frontier (1.3 exaflops).
The rapid advance of El Capitan is bad news for Intel, whose Aurora now drops to third place. Aurora was supposed to knock Frontier off its throne, but has so far failed to do so. With a peak achieved of 1.01 exaflops, Intel will have to add more than one prong if it wants to approach Frontier first and El Capitan second. For now, AMD rules in supercomputer land.
HPE
AMD may walk away with the plumes, but HPE also has reasons to frame the rankings. HPE is the silent force behind the fastest supercomputers. Many of the top ten fastest systems are built with HPE Cray technology. The entire top three are HPE-made, which can call itself the only party in the world to have three exascale computers to its name.
HPE also highlights its footprint in European supercomputers. El Capitan, Frontier and Aurora may have been born and raised in the United States, but further in the top ten are quite a few European supercomputers.
Eni’s HPC6 (Italy) made its first appearance in the Top500 with a debut listing at No. 5, making it the most powerful enterprise supercomputer in the world. HPE is also responsible for numbers seven and eight in the rankings. Those are Swiss supercomputer Alps and Lumi from Finland, respectively.