Three supercomputers from one Polish computing center joined the TOP500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers. They all work at the Cyfronet Academic Computer Center of the AGH University of Science and Technology in Kraków.
Athena is currently the fastest supercomputer in Poland, taking 105th position in the overall ranking. Ares took 290th and Prometheus 476th positions. Apart from them, the TOP500 list also includes two other Polish supercomputers – from Poznań and Gdańsk.
Athena has a theoretical computing power of over 7.7 PetaFlops (7709 TeraFlops). The Krakow supercomputer was also at the forefront of the most ecological supercomputers, i.e. with the highest energy efficiency, calculated as the ratio of the number of floating-point operations per second (supercomputer computing power) to energy consumption: Gflops / W. In this regard, it took 9th place.
Supercomputers can significantly reduce the time of performing calculations that would often take many years with the use of individual computers, and can most often be performed in just a few hours, and for large tasks – several days.
Supercomputer Frontier, installed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in the USA, was announced as the fastest supercomputer in the world. It is the first supercomputer to break 1 exaflop (1018) of floating-point operations per second, and its theoretical computing power is 1685.65 PFlops (1.69 EFlops).
The fastest European supercomputer was the LUMI supercomputer, designed thanks to the cooperation of 10 European countries, including Poland. In the latest Top500 list, LUMI came third, even though the GPU partition has not yet been fully installed. The current theoretical computing power of LUMI is 537 PFlops. Polish scientists can access it via the PLGrid Infrastructure.
Arkadiusz Słomczyński