Sandia’s Astra is the world’s fastest Arm-based supercomputer according to the just released TOP500 list, the supercomputer industry’s standard. With a speed of 1.529 petaflops, Astra placed 203rd on a ranking of top computers announced at SC18, the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis, in Dallas. A petaflop is a unit of computing speed equal to one thousand million million (1015) floating-point operations per second. Astra achieved this speed on the High-Performance Linpack benchmark. Astra is one of the first supercomputers to use processors based on Arm technology. The machine’s success means the supercomputing industry may have found a new potential supplier of supercomputer processors, since Arm designs are available for licensing. More details are in this article.
