The 59th Top500 list welcomes 39 new systems in total, with a wide geographical distribution. The U.S. has the most with nine, followed by Germany with five. For the first time in almost a decade, China has no new systems on the list. Despite that, China still has the largest number of systems on the list: 173 compared to 127 for the U.S., which has the second-most systems. By performance share, however, the U.S. lengthens its lead significantly on account of Frontier. The U.S. claims 2.08 exaflops of the list’s total 4.40 exaflops. China’s flops share, meanwhile, falls to 530.24 petaflops, which is roughly 25 percent of the U.S. share.
A conspicuous absence
Speaking of China, the nation is said to have stood up
that were in essence validated not by the Top500 or the HPL benchmark, but by the Gordon Bell Prize. The two systems include one called OceanLight that is operated by Wuxi Supercomputing Center and sited in Qingdao, and another, Tianhe-3, located in the city of Tianjin, east of Beijing. Tianhe-3 is based on a Phytium 2000+ FTP Arm chip plus a Matrix 2000+ MTP accelerator. The system, said to have been completed last fall, offers an estimated 1.7 exaflops peak performance and just over 1.3 exaflops on Linpack.
A source we spoke with ahead of ISC 2022 in Hamburg, who works with David Kahaner’s Asian Technology Information Program, said that China is planning a 10-exaflops machine in the 2025-2026 timeframe. The same person disputed
that said China would have 10 exascale systems by 25, saying that it must have been a misunderstanding. There were two 10-exaflops systems in the works for 2025, our source told us, but now it is much more likely there is only one 10-exaflops system planned for 2026. Like OceanLight, it will implement the Wuxi Sunway architecture, which is based on Alpha cores.
Noted Chinese HPC expert James Lin (vice director, HPC Center, Shanghai Jiao Tong University) said on Twitter a little over a week ago that the Top500 had become a de facto
. (The stated purpose of the entity list is to curtail or block the transfer of advanced technology to entities that have been deemed to pose a significant threat to U.S. interests.) “The vendors and the host centers of the top supercomputers in China are on both lists,” he
. “To be on Top500 is to foster international collaboration, but the result is the opposite. We don’t submit to Top500 in order to maintain connections.” The backing entity and supplier vendors of several Chinese systems benchmarked for the list indeed have ended up
in recent years.
