A few weeks ago, the Japanese unveiled the fastest supercomputer in human history called Fugoku. For a long time, however, they will not be on a pedestal with him, because an even more powerful machine from the USA enters the game. The country of the Rising Sun has finally dethroned China and the United States with its supercomputer. It is almost 3 times faster than the fastest machine to date called Summit, which is located in the USA. But the Japanese haven't said the last word yet. The Fugoku supercomputer from Fujitsu will have a computing power of 1500 TFlop / s next year. Then it should be at least 10 times more efficient than the American Summit.
Unfortunately, the Japanese will not be a global pioneer in the production of supercomputers for a long time. The Americans intend to take the baton again with an even more powerful machine called the El Capitan. It is built by the US Department of Energy, Cray and AMD. The supercomputer will be delivered at the famous Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where it will replace another supercomputer called Sierra. El Capitan is to have a computing power of over 2000 TFlop / s.
The US government does not hide that it will be used to make calculations and simulations related to the development of future nuclear weapons and safe nuclear reactors. These are small, compact reactors that will be able to be built in urban settlements. The government is also considering nuclear propulsion for space missions.
Construction of El Capitan is expected to cost around $ 600 million. The machine is to be based on the Cray Shasta architecture. The board will include AMD Epyc Genoa processors operating on the Zen 4 architecture and the next generation Radeony Instinct. The system is to be optimized for HPC and SI calculations. Meanwhile, thanks to the 3rd generation Infinity Fabric technique, it will be possible to unify the memory pool even more and speed up the computation.
AMD also wants to take advantage of the ROCm development environment. All available nodes will be connected to the Slingshot system developed by Cray. The company announces the achievement of data transfer at the level of 200 Gb / s per port, and advanced QoS functions. The machine will consume approx. 40 MW of power during its operation.
El Capitan is scheduled to be commissioned in 2023. Before this happens, however, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory will have another supercomputer called Frontier, which will have a computing power of 1500 TFlop / s, which will be comparable or even faster than the Japanese Fugoku. According to the Department of Energy, it is to become fully functional next year.
Supercomputers are gigantic systems made up of hundreds or thousands of computers connected to high-speed interconnects to transfer data and coordinate operations. They occupy rooms the size of tennis courts, use thousands or millions of CPUs, cost millions of dollars, and use enough electricity to power a city.