World's number-one supercomputer stays on top – how did Sisu succeed?
The latest Top500 list of the world's supercomputers was published yesterday and didn't offer any great surprises. Tianhe-2, built by China's National University of Defence Technology (NUDT), was ranked as the world's most powerful computer for the sixth time in a row. As expected, CSC's Sisu dropped slightly (from 51 to 59), but remains one of the most powerful computers in the Nordic countries. The supercluster Taito was ranked 317th.
There has been vigorous growth in research requiring supercomputers. Supercomputers are essential to many studies of, for example, climate change, renewable energy, fusion energy, space, cancer or new medicines. In addition to more traditional fields of study the humanities and social sciences are introducing computational methods as a consequence of digitisation and accelerating growth in data volumes.
Research competitiveness must be safeguarded
Finnish computational science is of a high standard. This is partly due to the outstanding entity of services where centralised, national scientific computing services offered through CSC are combined with decentralised solutions and international resources.
"Thanks to the investments made a few years ago, Finland's computational research environment is currently up to date. However, a closer look at the history of Top500 rankings indicates that, in practice, equipment must be renewed approximately every four years in order to maintain capacity and competitiveness for top-level research," says CSC's Managing Director Kimmo Koski.
Diagram: CSC's computing capacity and usage, 1989–2015.
Preparations for new investments must begin immediately
CSC is already preparing to safeguard future resources. Kimmo Koski and Taina Pihlajaniemi recently published an article called 'Perspectives' in CSC's online magazine, in which they emphasise the importance of scientific computing to both society and the competitiveness of Finnish research. Pihlajaniemi is Vice Rector/Vice President (Provost for Science and Research) at the University of Oulu, and chair of the Computational Science Forum established by the Ministry of Education and Culture.
Other upcoming publications include system architecture for scientific computing resources and their auxiliary services (drawn up by the Computational Science Forum) and the final report on CSC's researcher survey, which describes the computing resources that will be required by various scientific fields in 2017–2022.
SC15 – the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis – is currently being held in Austin, USA. This is the most important annual conference for experts in this field and attracts over 10,000 participants from across the globe. The latest Top500 list of the world's supercomputers was published at the event: http://top500.org/list/2015/11
Further information:
Kimmo Koski
Managing Director
CSC – IT Center for Science
kimmo.koski@csc.fi
tel. +358 (0)50 3819 777
Kimmo Koski and Taina Pihlajaniemi: Research competitiveness must be safeguarded
https://www.csc.fi/web/atcsc/-/tutkimuksen-kilpailukyky-turvattava
Supercomputing 15:
http://sc15.supercomputing.org, Twitter: #SC15
Top500 list:
http://www.top500.org