ORNL Announces Newest Leadership HPC: It’s More Than Just Exaflops

At SC17 in Denver, the Japanese RIKEN K computer emerged for the third straight time as the world's most powerful supercomputer based on the High Performance Conjugate Gradient (HPCG) benchmark list. Although China's Tianhe-2 supercomputer has been widely seen as number one in the world based on its LINPAC rating, the HPCG test that the K computer excelled on may be more representative of the range of real-world HPC problems encounter by users. Riken's K computer has been either number one or two since the HPCG list came out in 2014.

On April 16, 2018, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) in conjunction with SUSE and Arm teamed up with three leading UK universities to form the Catalyst UK program with the objective of accelerating the adoption of HPC by industry in the UK. The three-year program will center on the installation of an Arm processor-based supercomputer deployment spread across the University of Edinburgh, the University of Bristol, and the University of Leicester, due to be completed in summer 2018. In addition, the program is looking to reach out to UK industry to jointly develop Arm-based applications and workflows. Hyperion Research believes this effort is an important indicator of the UK’s commitment to building an indigenous HPC ecosystem centered on Arm processors, and one that could have wider implications for bolstering Arm-based HPC adoption in future European HPC designs.