[Hardware] AMD EPYC CPUs Power 3 of Top 10 Supercomputers on The Planet, Also Has 8 of The Top 10 Most Energy Efficient Supercomputers

[_Happy boy]

During the ISC High Performance 2021 seminar, it was revealed that not only are AMD's EPYC CPUs powering more of the top 10 supercomputers than Intel's Xeon chips but are also the leading in the energy efficiency charts.

AMD EPYC CPUs Power More Top 10 Performance & Energy Efficiency Supercomputers Than Intel's Xeon Chips
According to the TOP500 and Green500 charts, out of the top 10 positions, AMD is powering three supercomputers which include Perlmutter (NERSC Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory), Selene (NVIDIA Corporation), and JUWELS Booster Module (Forschungzentrum Julich FZH). All three of the supercomputers mentioned are powered by AMD's EPYC processors and based on various designs from HPE, BullSequana, and DGX. All of these supercomputers combined have a peak processing output of 172.2 PetaFlops which is expected to expand further in the coming years as deployment of more chips continues.

 Moving on to the top 10 Most Energy Efficient supercomputers, here AMD takes 8 spots while Intel takes the two spots including the top position. The Rmax/Power output of AMD's EPYC based Hiper Gator AI system is very close to Intel's MN-3 solution at 29.5 Rmax/Power versus 29.7 Rmax/Power. The accelerator used for the MN-3 is also MN-core while the rest of the systems in the list rely on NVIDIA's A100 accelerators.

 

In another chart, it is shown that while Intel CPUs still powers more servers than AMD, its numbers have declined since the previous charts. NVIDIA's share has seen dramatic growth with a 46% hold in the server HPC segment while Intel has fallen down from 54% to 51%.

This just goes off to show the tremendous feats that AMD has accomplished in the HPC efficiency and performance categories since it launched EPYC. NVIDIA should also be applauded for its GPU architectures which seem to be the go-to choice for several high-performance computing vendors.

Intel on the other hand has two supercomputers that are powered by its Xeon chips, the Dammam-7 for Saudi Aramco and HPC5 for Eni S.p.A. These two systems have a combined horsepower of up to 57.9 PetaFlops which is nothing in comparison to AMD's total supercomputing power in the top 10 but Intel does have more systems deployed overall in the Top500 category. Interestingly all AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon-based supercomputers feature NVIDIA Ampere A100 and Volta V100 GPUs.