28.11.2024
Under the motto "HPC creates," the conference offered an extensive technical and scientific program as well as numerous opportunities for networking and discussions about current developments and innovations.
The conference kicked off with the presentation of the latest TOP500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. The United States continues to dominate the list with three Exascale systems, all delivered by HPE Cray. Leading the pack is the newly completed El Capitan at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, achieving 1.74 ExaFLOPS in the Linpack benchmark. It replaces Frontier (ORNL) as the top-ranked supercomputer and pushes Aurora (Argonne National Laboratory) to third rank. Europe’s fastest system ranks fifth: The HPC6 system, delivering 477.9 PetaFLOPS and operated by the Italian energy company Eni S.p.A., is also supplied by HPE Cray.
The most powerful German systems on the list are operated by Forschungszentrum Jülich: JETI, ranked 18th with a performance of 83.14 PetaFLOPS, and the JUWELS Booster, ranked 33rd with 44.12 PetaFLOPS. DKRZ’s Levante supercomputer, about three years after its installation, still achieves rank 115.
As part of the conference, the Student Cluster Competition (SCC) provides a platform for young researchers to demonstrate their expertise. The DKRZ developed the tasks for both the on-site SCC and the associated online competition, IndySCC, using virtual machines. In collaboration with the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, the DKRZ created a tropical storm simulation with the ICON model. Participating teams were challenged to develop strategies to optimize the performance of this simulation across diverse platforms. Additionally, the DKRZ team was part of the SCC jury panel.