The UK’s top supercomputers

The most recent Top 500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers is led by the Fugaku supercomputer at the RIKEN Centre for Computational Science in Japan, with its Linpack performance rating of 442,010Tflop/sec.

The Nvidia Cambridge-1 isn’t yet on the list, but it will rank as the fastest in the UK and in the mid-50s globally with its claimed performance rating of about 8,000TFlop/sec. Here are the UK’s fastest official machines with their global ranking.

#1 in the UK (#58 globally)

United Kingdom Meteorological Office, made by Cray and HPE

241,920 cores using Intel Xeon E5 processors 116,032GB memory

Linpack performance 7,039TFlop/sec Theoretical peak performance 8,129TFlop/sec

#2 in the UK (#100 globally)

University of Cambridge’s Wilkes-3, made by Dell EMC 44,800 cores using AMD EPYC and Nvidia A100 processors

81,920GB memory

Linpack performance 4,124TFlop/sec Theoretical peak performance 6,641TFlop/sec

#3= in the UK (#103= globally)

European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts has two identical supercomputers, made by Cray and HPE

126,468 cores using Intel Xeon E5 processors 116,032GB memory

Linpack performance 3,945TFlop/sec Theoretical peak performance 4,249TFlop/sec

#5 in the UK (#125 globally)

Atomic Weapons Establishment’s Damson, made by Atos

113,832 cores using Intel Xeon E5 processors 404,736GB memory

Linpack performance 3,243TFlop/sec Theoretical peak performance 3,792TFlop/sec