Microsoft’s supercomputer is called Voyager-EUS2 and it was the only new entry in the latest ranking of the world’s most powerful machines
It’s called Voyager-EUS2 the new superfast supercomputer from Microsoft, and it has just entered the ranking of the ten most powerful machines in the world. It’s the only new entry in the latest top ten, so it’s a big satisfaction for Microsoft, also by virtue of the fact that it’s the only cloud services “big” to put a machine in the top 10.
The world’s most powerful supercomputer remains once again the Fugaku, a “beast” with 7.63 million cores (today’s smartphones have eight…) that allow it to have a power of 442 petaflops per second (pflop/s). The supercomputer Voyager-EUS2 of Microsoft is quite far from those values, but the two have different uses: the Fugaku is used for computational science at the RIKEN Center in Kobe, Japan. They run different “races” in short, and the certainly most curious aspect of the Microsoft supercomputer is that it does not have Windows but Linux, an operating system less user-oriented and more for a server use.
How is the Microsoft supercomputer
The Voyager-EUS2 supercomputer of Microsoft was able to obtain a speed of 30 petaflops per second thanks to over 253 thousand cores on CPU Epyc of AMD, while the GPU is a Nvidia A100 with 80 GB of memory. Numbers that a normal user can not even imagine, but that are even low if put side by side with those that characterize the machines that overtake the Microsoft supercomputer in the top ten of the most powerful in the world.
The Voyager-EUS2 is based in the United States and is governed, as anticipated, by Linux, specifically by the distro Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. That’s not surprising, because the open source operating system already rules inside most of the machines that run Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure, and more generally, nearly all of the world’s supercomputers are run by Linux.
Although Microsoft’s supercomputer is blazingly fast and even newer than others that populate the top 10 of the world’s highest performing, it’s less powerful than other solutions. For example, the Summit supercomputer owned by the U.S. Department of Energy is the most powerful computer installed in the U.S. today, based on an IBM Power9 CPU and Nvidia’s Tesla V100 GPU, the same equipment as the world’s fourth-largest supercomputer whose 94.6 pflop/s benefits the University of California’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
What is a supercomputer
Supercomputers are computers designed to produce very high computational capabilities in order to perform long and complex mathematical and scientific tasks. They are also called High Performance Computers or HPC, costing – obviously – insane amounts of money and consuming – just as obviously – significant amounts of energy.
Traditional machines for consumer use are designed to perform many different types of operations, from work to leisure through gaming or video editing, having to get the best compromise between performance, cost and power consumption. Supercomputers, on the other hand, are typically intended for data centers, so the design is carried out according to the tasks – specific – that will be assigned to the machine.