LARTop50: The Fastest Supercomputers in Latin America

According to LARTop50, the fastest supercomputer in Latin America is Miztli, installed at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). It has a maximum performance of roughly 80 TeraFLOPs. Miztli embodies 5,280 cores and features an Infiniband interconnect. The top 5 spots on the list contain systems from countries such as Brazil, Chile, and Argentina.

The LARTop50 project collects performance information and ranks the fastest supercomputers in Latin America. Similar to its world-wide counterpart (Top500 list), it presents the main features of each machine: name, site, country, vendor, system type, processor type, node and core counts, maximum and peak performance, power information, network type, and more.

To rank the different systems, LARTop50 uses the same benchmark suite as the Top500 list, LINPACK. LINPACK is a set of linear-algebra routines that are common to many numerical methods. It was originally written in the 1970s, and a parallel implementation of LINPACK for distributed-memory systems is the one used as the benchmark to rank supercomputers. This parallel implementation of LINPACK is called High Performance Linpack (HPL) and consists of a program that solves a collection of random linear equations. Despite some criticism, LINPACK and HPL continue to be the standard for comparing performance across a wide range of systems.

The LARTop50 project was originally conceived in 2011 at the Universidad Nacional de San Luis, Argentina. It is now composed of members of multiple Latin American organizations. The project aims at collecting performance information of HPC systems, diffusing that information within industrial, academic and governmental communities, promote training on HPC, and organize events to develop HPC in general.

Initiatives such as LARTop50 are very important to provide access to information otherwise nearly impossible to gather. HPC systems in Latin America lag behind the fastest supercomputers in the world. Therefore, it is hard for Latin American HPC system to make it to the Top500 list. LARTop50 brings visibility to Latin American supercomputers. In addition, LARTop50 provides an incentive for supercomputing facilities to adopt a standard mechanism, LINPACK in this case, to tune up and measure the performance of the system.

The current results on the list show only 13 systems. It is expected that this number grows in the future as the HPC community in the region gets more integrated and the use of HPC resources becomes mainstream. Also, as the project matures, more statistics will be available and more powerful projections can be drawn from the data.

For more information about LARTop50, visit its webpage http://lartop50.org.