El Capitan has retained its title as the world’s most powerful supercomputer on the most recent edition of the Top500 list, with the US Department of Energy once again operating all of the top three systems.

However, while all the supercomputers comprising the top ten retained their positions from six months ago, the fourth-place Jupiter Booster system officially became Europe’s first exascale supercomputer, posting an HPL score of exactly one exaflops – a significant increase from the 793.4 petaflops it achieved in June.

Housed at Germany’s Forschungszentrum Jülich campus, the Jupiter Booster – a partial version of the larger supercomputer being built at the supercomputing facility – is a BullSequana XH3000 featuring Nvidia GH200 Superchips.

El Capitan also saw an increase in its performance for the 66th edition of the list, posting a four percent gain from six months earlier for a total of 1.809 exaflops. Housed at Lawrence Livermore, the HPE Cray EX255a-based system is comprised of AMD 4th Gen Epyc 24C 1.8GHz CPUs and Instinct MI300A GPUs.

The system is one of six HPE Cray systems to make the top ten, a list that also includes Frontier, Aurora, HPC6, Alps, and LUMI.

Achieving 1.353 exaflops, Oak Ridge’s second-place Frontier system comprises AMD 3rd Generation Epyc 64C 2GHz CPUs and Instinct MI250X GPUs, while Argonne’s Cray EX-based Aurora with the Intel Exascale Compute Blade, Xeon CPU Max 9470 52C 2.4GHz, and Intel Data Center GPU Max, had an HPL score of 1.012 exaflops.

In fifth place was Microsoft Azure’s 561.2 petaflops Eagle, with Intel Xeon Platinum 8480C 48C 2GHz CPUs and Nvidia H100 GPUs, followed by the aptly named HPC6, another AMD-powered system operated by Italian oil giant Eni. The second most powerful supercomputer in Europe, HPC6, achieved 477.9 petaflops.

Japan’s Arm-based Fugaku supercomputer ranked seventh. Built by Fujitsu for Riken, it achieved 442.01 petaflops.

Eighth, ninth, and tenth place went to Switzerland’s 434.9 petaflops Alps, Finland’s 379.7 petaflops Lumi, and Italy’s 241.2 petaflops Leonardo, respectively. Both Lumi and Leonardo form part of the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) initiative.

Alice Recoque to become third AMD-powered exascale system

Following the release of the Top500 list, AMD and Eviden announced they would be building the Alice Recoque supercomputer, set to be Europe’s second exascale system.

Powered by AMD sixth-generation Epyc CPUs – codenamed Venice – and AMD Instinct MI430X GPUs, the BullSequana XH3500-based system will also have 432GB of HBM4 memory and 19.6 TBps of bandwidth.

According to Eviden, the system will have 25 percent fewer racks and components than other exascale systems and up to 50 percent better energy efficiency per GPU. The supercomputer is backed by a €544 million ($63m) investment from the EuroHPC JU and the Jules Verne Consortium, and will support scientific research, including climate modeling, advanced materials research, digital twin simulations, and next-generation AI models.

“We are committed to enabling the next generation of innovation across AI and HPC,” said Dan McNamara, SVP and GM, compute and enterprise AI, AMD. “The Alice Recoque supercomputer represents a major step forward for European sovereign AI, uniting national ambition, regional collaboration, and AMD’s high-performance and AI compute technologies. Through our continued collaboration with EuroHPC JU, the Jules Verne Consortium, and Eviden, we are proud to support Europe’s scientific and industrial leadership with a platform purpose-built for scale, efficiency, and discovery.”