Prometheus among the world's most powerful supercomputers again

The TOP500 ranking of the world\'s largest computing machines in the world is published twice a year. Latest results were announced on June 20 at a conference in Frankfurt. The list is clearly dominated by supercomputers from China (167 units, more than 33 percent) and the US (165 units, 33 percent).

Among Polish supercomputers, the highest, 48th place went to Prometheus, built by Hewlett-Packard according to the specification developed by Cyfronet AGH. It is one of the largest installations of this type in the world and also the first in Europe, based on the latest direct liquid cooling technology.

Director of Cyfronet AGH - Prof. Kazimierz Wiatr emphasised that Prometheus is also one of the most energy-efficient computers in its class in the world. Its energy efficiency matches the systems of the world\'s largest data centres, such as Google or Facebook. Furthermore, liquid cooling allows for an extremely high density of installation, so the computing part, weighing more than 30 tons, occupies an area of only 18 sq. m and just 20 cabinets.

"To illustrate the speed of the Prometheus you can say that in order to match its capabilities, you would have to use the power of more than 50 000 first-class PCs in the strongest configuration, additionally connected to a super-fast network and managed with special software" - he added.

Prometheus\' tasks include the analysis of the test results, numerical simulations, advanced visualizations and analysis of massive data sets (big data). Technological facilities of Cyfronet AGH also benefit international research projects, in which Polish scientists are involved.

In addition to Prometheus five other Polish supercomputers have been included in the ranking. In the 90th place was Hetman from the Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center; in 92nd Tryton of the Academic Computer Centre in Gdansk. 108th place went to Okeanos of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical Modelling, University of Warsaw, in the 148th place was Bem - Wroclaw Centre for Networking and Supercomputing, Wroclaw University of Technology, and the 292nd place went to the supercomputer of the National Centre for Nuclear Research.

First place in the ranking list of the world\'s most powerful supercomputers took Sunway TaihuLight installed at the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi. It is twice as fast and three times more efficient than the previous record holder Tianhe-2 (also Chinese).

PAP - Science and Scholarship in Poland

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