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TOP500 at ISC’26: We have a New Number 1 Supercomputer

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Re: TOP500 at ISC’26: We have a New Number 1 Supercomputer

#11

Post by dgacmu »

iberator wrote: post #10
brianolson wrote: post #7

> Why aren’t these AI companies submitting to the TOP500 to show off their computing prowess? my knowledge is 10+ years out of date, but once upon a time if they'd chosen to, Google could have had _several_ entries in the top 10 of the TOP500 list It's just poker, they didn't want to tip their hand

Cloud computing is not a supercomputer. Different architecture, bandwitch, interconnectivity and latencies.

That's not nearly as true when you look at AI training clusters. They're basically supercomputers but without an FP64 focus.

(These are the systems to which GP was referring at Google.)

Re: TOP500 at ISC’26: We have a New Number 1 Supercomputer

#12

Post by jandrewrogers »

TOP500 hasn't been a particularly useful measure of practical computing power in modern systems for many years because what it measures isn't a significant bottleneck in most real systems. It has become a measure of how much money someone is willing to spend for bragging rights. (HPCG is better in that it is a bit more bandwidth focused but still pretty narrow.)

Most companies with huge systems don't participate.

Re: TOP500 at ISC’26: We have a New Number 1 Supercomputer

#14

Post by jandrewrogers »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #3

Extremely impressive accomplishment considering they did this with Chinese interconnects and Chinese chips. This is a wake up call.

TOP500 can be done with inexpensive silicon. It is more about a willingness to aggregate enough hardware in one place. As a benchmark, it tells you almost nothing about computing power or scalability for other applications because it doesn't exercise the bottlenecks most high-scale applications have.

Re: TOP500 at ISC’26: We have a New Number 1 Supercomputer

#15

Post by flopsamjetsam »

> We think it is highly likely that these LX2 chiplets are etched using SMIC 7 nanometer processes at the N+3 refinement, and we base that on the fact that the chip only runs at 1.55 GHz. That is nowhere near the 3 GHz that SMIC can push with that process, but it is probably lower to get the memory and core speeds more balanced. [1]

Based on the ARMv9.2.

[1] https://www.nextplatform.com/hpc/2026/06/25/a-deep-dive-on-c...

Re: TOP500 at ISC’26: We have a New Number 1 Supercomputer

#16

Post by jandrewrogers »

ziofill wrote: post #13

> Two cores are disabled per cluster. I’m sure there is a good reason for this, which is..?

It is likely that those cores are dedicated to unrelated management, monitoring, and administrative tasks. This is common and many workloads are throttled on bandwidth anyway. For the purposes of the benchmark, those cores are not participating in the workload.

Re: TOP500 at ISC’26: We have a New Number 1 Supercomputer

#17

Post by ziofill »

brianolson wrote: post #7

> Why aren’t these AI companies submitting to the TOP500 to show off their computing prowess? my knowledge is 10+ years out of date, but once upon a time if they'd chosen to, Google could have had _several_ entries in the top 10 of the TOP500 list It's just poker, they didn't want to tip their hand

Also, would those 550k Blackwell have good FP64 performance? How would one even compare them?

Re: TOP500 at ISC’26: We have a New Number 1 Supercomputer

#18

Post by wmf »

iberator wrote: post #10
brianolson wrote: post #7

> Why aren’t these AI companies submitting to the TOP500 to show off their computing prowess? my knowledge is 10+ years out of date, but once upon a time if they'd chosen to, Google could have had _several_ entries in the top 10 of the TOP500 list It's just poker, they didn't want to tip their hand

Cloud computing is not a supercomputer. Different architecture, bandwitch, interconnectivity and latencies.

Historically there have been a bunch of clusters on the Top 500 that weren't used for HPC. The tell is that they used Ethernet (this was before RoCE). It's less efficient but you can still get an OK Linpack score.

Re: TOP500 at ISC’26: We have a New Number 1 Supercomputer

#19

Post by jeffbee »

dgacmu wrote: post #11
iberator wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloud computing is not a supercomputer. Different architecture, bandwitch, interconnectivity and latencies.

That's not nearly as true when you look at AI training clusters. They're basically supercomputers but without an FP64 focus. (These are the systems to which GP was referring at Google.)

I thought TPUs couldn't reasonably run LINPACK at all because TPUs do not acknowledge that FP64 exists.

I know Google wants to compare their stuff to El Capitan or whatever but the comparison does not seem valid to me.

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