Russia's Lomonosov Supercomputer Sets World Record in Graph500 Benchmark

Russia's Lomonosov supercomputer, installed at the Moscow State University, has become the fastest system to ever complete the Graph500 benchmark used to determine which supercomputers are most efficient at processing arrays of sparse data.

Such tasks are commonplace in pharmacology, information security, and many other knowledge-driven industries and require high-performance systems capable of processing hundreds of petabytes of data.

In the course of the tests, the time spent by each system to process a generated graph is assessed and the result is measured in terms of the number of edges traversed in a unit of time.

At the end of the tests, the Lomonosov system managed to achieve 43.5 GE/s (billion edges processed per second), the highest Graph500 result ever recorded.

Lomonosov supercomputer is the most powerful HPC system in Eastern Europe, delivering 1,3 PFlops of peak, and 674 TFlops of sustained performance, under Linpack.

The machine occupies the number 13 spot on the TOP500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers and was built by Russian supercomputer vendor T-Platforms.

At the heart of the system stands the TB2-TL hybrid blade system that packs 32 Nvidia Tesla X2070 general purpose GPUs as well as 32 Intel Xeon L5600-series processors inside a 7U enclosure. These are connected together via a QDR Infiniband 40Gb/s interconnect.

“The Graph500 ratings are interesting because they allow us to assess not only the computing power of supercomputers but also their efficiency, in real terms, at processing huge quantities of data. In such tests, those computer systems that have been optimized for working with large arrays of data will always triumph,” says Vsevolod Opanasenko, CEO of T-Platforms.

“The Lomonosov supercomputer has proven its efficiency in a number of scientific projects carried out at Lomonosov Moscow State University and shown outstanding performance during the latest Graph500 Benchmark tests.

“This is yet another endorsement of Russia’s achievements in creating high-performance systems aimed at solving an extremely wide range of applied problems,” concluded the company's rep.