Accelerator Use Surges in World's Top Supercomputers

AUSTIN, TX--(Marketwired - Nov 16, 2015) -

TOP500 Highlights

• One-third of FLOPS now powered by accelerators
• NVIDIA Tesla GPUs sweep 23 of 24 new accelerated supercomputers
• Tesla supercomputers growing at 48% CAGR over past five years

SC15 - Today's list of the world's TOP500 supercomputers shows the extent to which accelerated systems are shaping the future of the industry.

For the first time, more than 100 accelerated systems are on the list of the world's 500 most powerful supercomputers, accounting for 143 petaflops, over one-third of the list's total FLOPS. NVIDIA® Tesla® GPU-based supercomputers comprise 70 of these systems -- including 23 of the 24 new systems on the list -- reflecting compound annual growth of nearly 50 percent over the past five years.

There are three primary reasons accelerators are becoming increasingly adopted for high performance computing.

First, Moore's Law continues to slow, forcing the industry to find new ways to deliver computational power more efficiently. Second, hundreds of applications -- including the vast majority of those most commonly used -- are now GPU accelerated. Third, even modest investments in accelerators can now result in significant increases in throughput, maximizing efficiency for supercomputing sites and hyperscale datacenters.

"One day, all supercomputers will be accelerated," said Jen-Hsun Huang, co-founder and chief executive officer at NVIDIA. "Leading supercomputing sites around the world have turned to GPU-accelerated computing, reflected in today's TOP500 list. As the pace of discovery accelerates and researchers turn to computation, machine learning and visualization, we fully expect to see this trend increase." 

Many of the world's leading systems use NVIDIA Tesla accelerators, including the fastest supercomputers in 10 countries. These include: the fastest system in the U.S., Titan, at Oak Ridge National Laboratory; the fastest system in Russia, Lomonosov 2, at Moscow State University; and the fastest system in Europe, Switzerland's Piz Daint, at the Swiss National Computing Center.

Moore's Law Slows
As the size of transistors approaches atomic scale, it has become increasingly difficult to improve microchip performance without disproportionately increasing power or cost. While the industry can no longer rely on performance doubling every 18 months, computational demands continue to increase sharply. This has led to the growing adoption of accelerators, which work alongside CPUs to boost the performance of scientific and technical applications.