Core42's HPC systems ranked 1 & 2 in the Middle East

Core42 continues to be ranked as second-largest NVIDIA SuperPOD globally

#UAE #HPC - The latest edition of the TOP500 list has ranked Core42’s two largest high-performance computing (HPC) systems as 32nd and 33rd in the world, meaning that the sovereign cloud services provider now has the 1st and 2nd most powerful supercomputers in the Middle East. In addition to the G42 company’s NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD™, which appeared in November’s TOP500 ranking and is the second-largest NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD deployment worldwide, Core42 now also has a AI-03 Supermicro system with AMD Instinct MI210 Accelerators. The TOP500 list ranks the top 500 most powerful commercially available computer systems worldwide.

SO WHAT? - Due to US export restrictions in high-end AI chips, until the second half of last year UAE-based Core42 was heavily reliant on its US-based supercomputer network Condor Galaxy. The delivery of a 55.81 petaFLOP NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD changed the situation. The new Top500 ranking confirms that the SuperPOD configuration remains one of the most powerful HPC systems in the world and that Core42 now has an almost equally powerful system: a Supermicro AI-03 with AMD Instinct MI210 accelerators. The AI-03 has almost half a million AMD cores.

Here are some more details about Core42’s TOP500 ranking:

• The TOP500 list of the 500 known most powerful commercially available computer systems in the world, has ranked Core42’s NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD and Supermicro AI-03 with AMD Instinct MI210 accelerator as 32nd and 33rd respectively.

• The TOP500 ranking also shows that the two HPC systems rank 1st and 2nd in the Middle East, followed by an Israeli system in 3rd and Shaheen III, KAUST’s supercomputer coming in 4th.

• Core42 SuperPOD with NVIDIA DGX H100s

  • Marketed by NVIDIA as a turnkey AI data center, the DGX SuperPOD enables scalable AI applications, eliminating platform complexity.

  • According to TOP500, Core42's NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD has 185,712 CPU and GPU cores, powered by Intel Xeon Platinum 8480C processors and NVIDIA DGX H100 GPUs, with HGX accelerated systems built using Dell PowerEdge XE9680 and VAST Data’s platform. TOP500 says that the system has Rmax¹ performance of 55.81 petaflops and a theoretical peak (Rpeak²) of 87.27 petaflops.

  • The system integrates NVIDIA’s H100 architecture, featuring 16,896 CUDA cores, 528 Tensor cores, and 80GB HBM2e memory, offering up to 3x performance improvement over the H100’s predecessor, the NVIDIA A100.

• Core42 Supermicro AI-03 with AMD Instinct

  • The Core42 AI-03 is a Supermicro GPU server system built for AMD’s EPYC processors, which offers maximum acceleration and flexibility for AI and deep learning, HPC applications and scientific research.

  • With a Supermicro AS-4125GS-TNRT2 server configuration, the Core42 AI-03 has 483,840 core processors including AMD EPYC 9334 32C 2.7GHz and AMD Instinct MI210 64 GB. TOP500 says that the system has Rmax¹ performance of 54.12 petaflops and a theoretical peak (Rpeak²) of 99.12 petaflops.

• Core42 has effectively doubled its UAE-based compute capacity during the past year, as it rolls out sovereign cloud solutions for UAE customers and positions itself as a sovereign cloud provider globally. The addition of the AI-03 brings its locally-based UAE compute power to 110 petaflops.

ZOOM OUT - To put Core42’s level of available computing power into perspective, its two UAE-based HPC systems have almost twice the compute performance of all Aramco HPC systems listed in the TOP500. As one of the most intensive users of computing power in the world, Saudi Aramco has five HPC systems listed in the TOP500 with a combined theoretical Rmax performance of 58.06 petaflops. The compute performance of Core42’s SuperPOD and AI-03 systems combined, totals 109.93 petaflops (Rmax). However, the performance of all the single HPC systems in the TOP500 are dwarfed by the scale of the Cerebras Systems-Core42 supercomputer network Condor Galaxy, which currently has a combined theoretical performance of about 20 exaflops.

[Written and edited by a human]

LINKS

• TOP500 list - June 2025 (TOP500)

Read more about Core42’s HPC capacity:

• Core42’s NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD ranks no. 1 (Middle East AI News)

• Cerebras and G42 begin building CG-2 (Middle East AI News)

• Cerebras & G42 build massive supercomputer network (Middle East AI News)