The latest results of the TOP500 List, which ranks the world’s fastest supercomputers, have been released for the first half of 2018. The IBTA is excited to highlight that Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Summit system, the new most powerful supercomputer in the world, is accelerated by InfiniBand EDR. InfiniBand powers the top three and four of the top five systems. The TOP500 results not only show InfiniBand powering the world’s leading supercomputers, it also continues to connect the majority of the list’s high performance computing (HPC) systems. These results underscore InfiniBand’s position as the interconnect of choice for the most demanding HPC platforms in the industry.

Within the HPC category of the TOP500 List, InfiniBand represents nearly 60% of all systems. The HPC category includes academic, research and government fields, which all require high bandwidth and compute efficiency for processing massive, complex data sets.

The TOP500 List continues to steadily evolve to feature an increased number of non-HPC systems in its ranks, with almost half of the platforms in the latest results categorized as non-HPC. These non-HPC segments include enterprise, hyperscale and cloud deployments – most of which are Ethernet-based. There is also a growing percentage of RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) capable systems, which constitute over 30% of total Ethernet listings.

With submissions from 27 countries, the latest TOP500 List also demonstrates an international awareness of the wide-ranging benefits of investing in HPC capabilities and applications. Notably, InfiniBand was reported as powering the most powerful systems in nearly half of the countries on the list. This is a testament to the important role that high performing standards-based solutions, such as those developed by the IBTA and its members, play in supporting global efforts to improve regional economies and research through advancements in HPC.

As evident in the latest TOP500 List, the reinforced position of InfiniBand among the most powerful HPC systems and growing prominence of RoCE-capable non-HPC platforms demonstrate the technology’s unparalleled performance capabilities across a diverse set of applications.

The complete TOP500 List can be found on https://www.top500.org/ and you can read the IBTA’s full announcement here.

Bill Lee