The supercomputers are essential today because they get to perform calculations that could take you decades in conventional computers in just hours or days. At the international level there is a battle to have the most powerful supercomputers, which requires large investments in hardware to expand and renew the available equipment. However, for a year and a half they have not managed to overcome the most powerful in the world.
We are talking about the Fugaku, the most powerful supercomputer in the world after a year and a half. The set of computers that makes up this supercomputer uses Fujitsu processors. Specifically, they equip the A64FX , with 48 cores each, where they use almost 16,000 of these processors with a total of 7.6 million processing cores.
Fugaku remains unbeatable after a year and a half
This processor has a build size of 7 nanometers, and uses ARM architecture instead of x86-64. The A64FX was designed by Fujitsu specifically for the Fugaku, and they are working on smaller implementations to take advantage of all the advantages it offers in terms of power consumption and processing power.
The TOP500 website produces a list of the 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world every two years, and has now published the report for June 2021. In it, we can see the Fugaku in the first place, reaching 442 Pflops / s in the HPL benchmark, being three times more powerful than his immediate follower, so it will be very difficult to overcome him in the short term.
Second, we have Summit, a regular on the podium of the most powerful supercomputers, and which is located in Tennessee (United States). It has 148.8 Pflops / s of processing capacity, with 22- core IBM POWER9 and NVIDIA Volta GV100 processors .
Third, we also have another regular at the top of the rankings, the Sierra, also in the United States, and which also uses IBM POWER9 and NVIDIA Volta GV100 processors.
Spain still does not receive updates
Thus, in the top 10, the United States is the country with the most supercomputers with a total of five , after having been behind for a few years compared to other superpowers. China has two, Germany one, and Italy another, while Japan has one in the top 10, but it is the most powerful of all. In fact, even if we add the five supercomputers in the top 5 in the United States, they do not even power the Japanese computer (442 vs almost 395 Pflops / s).
In Spain, MareNostrum , despite having been rubbing shoulders with the best in the world at the time, has lagged a bit behind after not having received major updates in recent years. In 2019, the EU announced that it was going to update the processing power of its most advanced supercomputers, but so far none have received major updates despite the deadline being December 31, 2020 , probably due to the pandemic.
Following the EU-budgeted upgrade, the MareNostrum should reach 110 Pflops / s , making it the third most powerful supercomputer in the world. However, China and the United States are working on new supercomputers, as well as on improving the current ones, so the list will continue to give us surprises.
