New Flatiron Institute Supercomputer, Image/Lenovo
Operated by the Flatiron Institute in New York City, a new supercomputer earns #1 on the latest Green500 List of the most power-efficient supercomputers in the world. A joint effort with Lenovo and NVIDIA, at 2.038 million billion FLOPS, the Flatiron Institute Supercomputer tops sustainable high-performance computing (HPC):
“The revised list, which ranks supercomputers based on the number of floating-point operations per second (or ‘FLOPS’) per watt of power, clocks the new supercomputer at 65.091 billion FLOPS per watt. That edges out the previous record holder, which managed 62.684 billion FLOPS per watt.”
Physically located in New Jersey, the new Lenovo built supercomputer includes 80 new NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs, connected with NVIDIA’s Quantum 200Gb/s InfiniBand network and installed in standard data center racks. The supercomputer utilizes Lenovo’s ThinkSystem SR670 V2, a server designed for traditional data centers and is therefore available to more researchers:
“As a world leader in supercomputing, Lenovo is committed to making the same Exascale-ready technologies available for users of all sizes and across all industries,” said Kirk Skaugen, Executive Vice President, Lenovo Group and President of Infrastructure Solutions Group. “Our collaboration with Flatiron and NVIDIA demonstrates a pivotal milestone in enabling supercomputing technology at nearly any scale and supporting smarter technology for all.”
The new Flatiron Institute supercomputer unseated the Frontier Test and Development System (TDS), located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee based on the power efficiency list:
“Frontier TDS set an extremely high bar on the June 2022 list at 62.684 billion FLOPS per watt, while the main Frontier system — which broke the exaFLOP (1 billion FLOPS) barrier and remains the fastest supercomputer in the world — checks in at 52.227 billion FLOPS per watt.”
The Flatiron Institute supercomputer is accessible to more users and groups because it utilizes commonly available systems, NVIDIA accelerated computing and InfiniBand networking which contribute to very high performance and efficiency standards:
“It only took a couple of people to load the system in. This kind of efficiency is now accessible to a lot more groups rather than just the largest supercomputing centers.”
