Gorden Bell prize is the highest prize awarded from ACM to recognize the outstanding progress of HPC applications every year, in memory of Gorden Bell, the prioneer of high performance and parallel computing.
Gorden Bell prize recipients in the last 10 years
Full recipients list is available at: https://awards.acm.org/bell/award-recipients.
| Year | Machine | Institution | PFLOPS (dtype) peak% 1 | Mixed Precision | Field |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | BlueGene/Q | LLNL/UT Austin, USA 🇺🇸 | 0.00687 (fp64), 3.41% | N/A | Earth Science |
| 2016 2 | Sunway TaihuLight | NSCC Wuxi, China 🇨🇳 | 7.95 (fp64), 6.45% | N/A | Atmospheric Dynamics |
| 2017 | Sunway TaihuLight | NSCC Wuxi, China 🇨🇳 | 18.9 (fp64), 15% | N/A | Earthquake Simulation |
| 2018 3 | Summit | ORNL, USA 🇺🇸 | 189 (fp32), 43% | fp32/fp16 | Gene Studies |
| 2018 | Summit | ORNL, USA 🇺🇸 | 325.8 (fp32), 75.8% | fp32/fp16 | DL for Climate |
| 2019 | Summit | ORNL, USA 🇺🇸 | 85.45 (fp64), 42.55% | fp64/fp16 | Quantum |
| 2020 | Summit | ORNL, USA 🇺🇸 | 91 (fp64), 45.31% | fp64/fp32/fp16 | Molecular Dynamics |
| 2021 | New Sunway | NSCC Wuxi, China 🇨🇳 | 1200 (fp32) | fp32/fp16 | Quantum |
| 2022 4 | Frontier | ORNL, USA 🇺🇸 | 43.45 (fp64), 9.73% | fp64/fp32 | Particle in Cell |
| 2023 | Frontier | ORNL, USA 🇺🇸 | 659.7 (fp64), 43.1% | fp64/fp32 | Quantum |
| 2024 | Frontier | ORNL, USA 🇺🇸 | 1006.7 (fp64), 59% | N/A | Molecular Dynamics |
Some observations:
- Mixed precision is widely used in Gorden Bell applications since NVIDIA proposed the 1st gen Tensor Core with
fp16support in V100, 2017 - The application readiness and system availability are often synchronized. Notably, Sunway TaihuLight, Summit and Frontier won their first Gordon Bell Awards almost concurrently with their debut at the top of the TOP500 list.
- US better exploits the potential of built HPC systems, evidenced by the Gordon Bell Prize in a row achieved by the same generation (4 for Summit, 3 for Frontier as for 2025/04).
Footnotes
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Same system may report "different" peak performance as different specification/#nodes may be adopted across works. ↩
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Sunway TaihuLight won its first place in 2016/06: https://top500.org/lists/top500/2016/06/ ↩
-
Summit gained the first place in 2018/06: https://top500.org/lists/top500/2018/06/ ↩
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Frontier gained the first place in 2022/06: https://top500.org/lists/top500/2022/06/ ↩