Spotlight: Latin America’s most powerful supercomputers

Latin America features 10 of the world’s 500 most powerful supercomputers, with Brazil being home to nine of them.

The TOP500 is an industry ranking carried out by the namesake organization based on data and inputs submitted by institutions and countries across the globe. 

The ranking is published in June and November each year.

In the latest ranking, Latin America’s most powerful machine remained Brazilian oil giant Petrobras’ Pégaso supercomputer, ranking 70^th worldwide with over 19 petaflops (PFlops) per second in capacity. A petaflop is equivalent to 1 quadrillion flops, or operations per second.

In the November 2023 ranking, Petrobras’ machine ranked 44^th. 

Activated in 2022, Pégaso was developed by French firm Atos’ Eviden, with Supermicro servers assembled in Brazil by Positivo and powered by AMD's Epyc 7513 32C processors and Nvidia’s A100 GPUs.

The TOP500 report shows that Pégaso is also the sixth most powerful in the global oil and gas industry. 

Petrobras owns another five of LatAm’s most powerful supercomputers.

2-Santos Dumont

Ranked second in Latin America and 90^th worldwide is Santos Dumont, operated by Brazil’s scientific computing laboratory LNCC, an academic and research institution linked to the science, technology and innovation ministry. 

Santos Dumont went live in 2015 and has since undergone several updates.

The supercomputer boasts 14.2 petaflops, with a peak of 20.2, and was built by Eviden. It is powered by Intel’s Xeon Platinum processors and Nvidia’s GraceHopper CPUs, among other features.

Atos is currently delivering a new supercomputer to LNCC to complement Santos Dumont. The new system, consisting of six BullSequana XH3000 racks, 124 blades and three service racks, is expected to start operating in the coming months.

3-Dragão

Another Petrobras machine, Dragão ranked 135^th and went operational in 2021. It was also built by Eviden, with Supermicro servers made by Positivo, Intel’s processors and Nvidia’s GPUs.

The supercomputer was clocked with 8.98 petaflops and 14.01 peak in the latest ranking.

4-Gaia

Petrobras’ Gaia supercomputer was activated in March 2023. Ranking 164^th in the TOP500, it was built by Dell, with its PowerEdge servers, and powered by AMD’s Epyc processors and Nvidia’s A100 GPUs. Gaia has 6.97 petaflops, with a peak of 13.7.

The system is focused on research and was set up at the Petrobras development and innovation research center (Cenpes) in Rio de Janeiro. As previously reported by BNamericas, the contract was won by Dell for 76mn reais (US$15.4mn).

5-Clementina XXI

Argentina’s Clementina XXI came 201^st in the global 500 list. The supercomputer was built for the country’s national meteorological service by Lenovo and went live in 3Q23. 

It has Lenovo’s ThinkSystem’s servers, with Intel’s processors and GPUs.

According to the latest ranking, the country’s most powerful supercomputer has 5.39 petaflops in capacity and a peak of 12.58.

6-Atlas

Petrobras’ Atlas went live in 2020, built by Atos’ Eviden with its Bull servers, and powered by Intel’s processors and Nvidia’s GPUs. 

The supercomputer ranked 229^th, with 4.38 petaflops, peaking at 8.85.

7-Gemini

Another Petrobras machine, Gemini is a Dell project. It was delivered in August 2023, and features Dell’s PowerEdge servers, AMD’s Epyc processors and Nvidia’s GPUs.

Gemini is being used for seismic processing by Petrobras’ exploration and production area. It came 266^th in the latest ranking, with 3.86 petaflops and a peak of 6.86.

8-Iara

Coming in at 275^th, Iara is a supercomputer owned by Brazilian AI, cloud and software institution SiDi. It was activated in 2022 and is said to be the biggest LatAm supercomputer focused on AI. 

Iara is a Portuguese acronym for ‘artificial intelligence revolutionizing tomorrow’, a project supported by Samsung. The supercomputer was built by Nvidia, has 3.66 petaflops, a peak of 4.13 and also features AMD’s Epyc processors in addition to Nvidia’s chips.

9-NOBZ1

NOBZ1 is a system owned by a Brazilian software company called MBZ and activated in 2022. It was built with Lenovo’s servers, Intel’s Xeon processors and Broadcom chips.

The machine ranked 288^th, with 3.55 petaflops and a reported peak of 6.97.

10-Fênix

The last LatAm supercomputer in the TOP500, Petrobras’ Fênix ranked 318^th, with 3.16 petaflops in capacity and a peak of 5.39. 

Fênix went live in 2019 and was manufactured by Eviden with Bull servers, Intel’s Xeon processors and Nvidia’s GPUs.

Petrobras leads

Leader in the field, the oil company is about to have five new supercomputers, all to be delivered by Lenovo. The biggest of them should weigh approximately 50t and have capacity of approximately 73 petaflops. 

When the installation is complete, it will replace the Fênix, Atlas and Dragão supercomputers, which will be shut down.

Global ranking

On a global basis, El Capitan, a US government platform maintained by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), was ranked the most powerful supercomputer.

It reached a record high of 1.742 exaflops (HPL) in performance and overtook former leader Oak Ridge's Frontier supercomputer, which recorded 1.353 exaflops in processing capacity.

The 64th edition of the TOP500 found AMD and Intel processors to be the preferred option for systems in the top 10.

Intel continues to provide processors for the largest share (61.8%) of TOP500 systems, down from 63% six months ago, while 162 (32.4%) of the systems in the current list used AMD processors, up from 31.2% six months ago.

The US leads with 172 supercomputers in the ranking, followed by China (62), Germany (41), Japan (34), France (24) and Italy (14). Brazil ranks 11^th worldwide.

“While China and the United States were once again the countries that earned the most entries on the TOP500 list, it would appear that China is not participating to the extent that it once did,” said the organizers.

China’s Lenovo leads as high-performance computing (HPC) manufacturer, with 161 projects in the 500 list. Next comes HPE (115), Eviden (52), Dell (37) and Nvidia (27).

Finally, a total of 212 systems on the list are using accelerator/co-processor technology, up from 194 six months ago, which indicates the machines are becoming more and more powerful, 72 of which use Nvidia Ampere chips.