NVIDIA GPU-Accelerated Systems Jump Nearly 50 Percent in One Year;
Accelerate Fastest Supercomputers in the World – U.S., Europe, Japan; Power 22 of World’s 25 Most Energy-Efficient Supercomputers
SINGAPORE—November 12, 2018—NVIDIA’s position as the most dynamic force in global supercomputing was confirmed today in the just-issued TOP500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers.
The closely watched list, released at the start of the SC18 annual high performance computing conference, shows a 48 percent jump in one year in the number of systems using NVIDIA GPU accelerators. The total climbed to 127 from 86 a year ago, and is three times greater than five years ago.
Moreover, NVIDIA GPUs power the world’s two fastest supercomputers – the US Department of Energy’s Summit, at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and Sierra, at Lawrence Livermore National Lab. Combined, the two systems feature more than 40,000 NVIDIA V100 Tensor Core GPUs which enabled the world’s leading researchers to do groundbreaking research recognised in five out of this year’s six finalists for the Gordon Bell Prize, to be awarded during this week’s SC18 conference.
Europe’s and Japan’s fastest supercomputers are also accelerated by NVIDIA GPUs.
Also released today, the GREEN500 list, which measures the energy-efficiency of the world’s fastest systems, shows that NVIDIA powers 22 of the top 25 “greenest” systems.
The latest list marks another milestone — for the first time, nearly half of its compute power — 702 of 1,417 petaflops– comes from accelerated systems. Prior to 10 years ago, no accelerated systems appeared on the list.
“This is a breakout year for NVIDIA in the world of supercomputing,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “With the end of Moore’s law, a new HPC market has emerged, fueled by new AI and machine learning workloads. These rely as never before on our high performance, highly efficient GPU platform to provide the power required to address the most challenging problems in science and society.”
The latest list shows that 52, or one-third, of the 153 systems debuting on the TOP500 are GPU accelerated, compared with 33 new GPU-accelerated systems on the list a year ago
Among the new systems this year is NVIDIA DGX-2 POD™, at No. 61. The first DGX–2 cluster appearing on the list, it combines 36 DGX-2 systems and delivers more than 3 petaflops of double-precision performance. Based on these results, a cluster of only 11 of these systems would earn a spot on the current TOP500 list.
