The Top 500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers is a critical list for tracking the evolution of the high performance computing (HPC) landscape.

Today the 63th edition of the Top 500 list was released for June 2024 ranking the world's most powerful supercomputers. The list also provides insights into the components that the top systems use for compute and networking interconnect technologies. As has been the case for the last year, the United States continues to dominate the top positions, with 171systems on the list.

The reigning champion from the November 2023 list, the Frontier system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has maintained its position as the world's fastest supercomputer. Frontier boasts a world leading High Performance Linpack (HPL) mark of 1.206 EFlop/s (exaflops per second). The system, built by HPE Cray, harnesses the power of 8,699,904 combined CPU and GPU cores, which include AMD EPYC processors and AMD Instinct accelerators.

The most notable addition to the latest TOP500 list is the Aurora system, housed at the Argonne National Laboratory.

Aurora has officially become the second exascale-class machine, achieving a remarkable performance of 1.012 exaflops. Aurora is another HPE Cray system but this time it's not AMD but rather an Intel based system.

Aurora uses Intel Xeon CPU Max Series processors, andIntel Data Center GPU Max Series accelerators. The system has a total of 9,264,128 cores across its deployment at the Argonne National Laboratory.

When it comes to supercomputer networking two technologies tend to go head to head - Ethernet and Infiniband.

In the June 2024 list, Infiniband holds a 47.8 percent share, or 239 systems, up from a 40% share and 200 systems in the June 2023 list. Ethernet has slipped a bit over the last year, in June 2023 it topped the  list with a 45.4% share with 227 systems. For June 2024, the system figure dropped to 195 systems for a 39% share.

While Infiniband and Ethernet jostle for position, looking into the details reveals that the top system is not actually using either technology. Frontier, the current number 1 supercomputer is using the HPE Cray Slingshot-11 interconnect networking technology that is Ethernet compatible, but it's not actually Ethernet.

Out of the Top 10, five systems use Intel Xeon processors, two use AMD processors and one system uses IBM processors (Summit).

While the Top 500 list overall shows some diversity in terms of different CPU, GPU and network interconnects, in one area there is surprising uniformity. That area is operating system architecture.

For the June 2024 list, Linux commands a staggering 100% (not a typo), for complete dominance of the supercomputing space.