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Linux Clusters Finally Break the TeraFLOP barrier
cworley submitted - several times - this well-linked submission about a slightly boring topic - fast computers. "Top500.org
has just released its latest
list of the world's fastest supercomputers (updated twice yearly). For
the first time, Linux Beowulf clusters
have joined the teraFLOP club, with six new clusters breaking the teraFLOP
barrier. Two Linux clusters now rank in the Top 10: Lawrence Livermore's "MCR" (built by Linux NetworX ) ranks #5 achieving 5.694 teraFLOP/s, and Forecast Systems Laboratory's "Jet" (built by HPTi) ranks #8 reaching
3.337 TeraFLOP/s. Other Linux clusters surpassing the teraFLOP/s barrier
include:
LSU's "SuperMike" at #17 (from Atipa
), the University at Buffalo
at #22 and Sandia National Lab at
#32 (both from Dell ), an Itanium cluster
for British Petroleum Houston at #42 (from HP
), and Argonne National Labs at
#46 (from Linux NetworX ) reached just
over the one teraFLOP/s mark with 361 processors. In the previous Top500 list compiled last June, the fastest Intel based Netfinity 1024 processor clusters from IBM were sub-teraFLOP/s and the University of Heidelberg's AMD based "HELICS" cluster (built by
Megware
) held the top tux rank at #35 with 825 GFLOP/s."
now why not try using macs for your supercomputers?
I know that they arn't as scalable
I think you answered your own question there.
Ah, that would be because Apples 'supercomputer on the desktop' marketing drivel was just that.
Hell, the Sony Playstation 2 was subject to export restrictions because it was 'too powerful', which was driven by/followed with the requisite marketing drivel, but you don't see and PS2 clusters in the 'Worlds fastest supercomputer' list either.
It has been a long time since Apple PPC was competitive in terms of price/performance with x86s. Of course thats not the only reason to buy a computer, i don't want to get the apple-zealots panties in a bunch.
It's just that Intel/AMD didn't make a song and dance about breaking the GFLOP barrier, since that happened way back with the P3/Athlon 600-800, hardly cutting edge chips.
Hell, a 600Mhz Alpha had GFLOP performance years before either the G4 or the x86s.
The PPC has a nice vector processing unit (Altivec), which could make it a good choice in some situations, but given the premium you pay for Beowulf nodes (Xserves?) from Apple, you will, in general, get a lot more bang for the buck from x86.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
First of all, it's a principle not a theorem. Second, the joke doesn't make any sense! It's all fine and good if your making such a joke to a group of grade schoolers, but if your audience knows better, you come off as a fucking boob.
Actually, neither are FLOPS. It wildly depends on what you do in your program, and no benchmark is representative.
As an instructor for the course 'Optimizing for the CRAY J932' told my class: the 'Theoretical Peak Performance' is the performance the manufacturer guarantees you won't exceed.
Why don't they write it: FLOP/s?
Because FLOPS means FLoating point Operations Per Second
'/' means 'per'.
FLOP/s would mean FLoating point Operations Per Per Second
FLO/s doesn't seem like a very good idea, except for cleaning your teeth.
It depends on what you're trying to do. An awful lot of supercomputer sites *are* solving, more or less, very large matrices. In that case it means everything.
Some applications scale on these kinds of clusters and some don't. But to say that "MFlops does not mean a lot" is just as silly a blanket statement as pretending that the Linpack benchmark is "the speed" of the computer.
That Cray does look pretty awesome, btw.
Flat5
Meh, it's got pretty impressive image recognition, but can't do math for shit - all in all, I'm not amazed.
sic transit gloria mundi
Did I miss the sarcasm tags on the "slightly boring" comment or something? I think there's a large audience on slashdot who are all very excited about high speed computing. Overclockers aside, I know I hate waiting for a compile.
Latley though, I feel the things I'm waiting for my computer are not a function of how fast the CPU can run, but how poorly the software is written. Can someone can tell me why my windoze machines sometimes block for up to a min when I try to click the "Location" box on the top of the file browser common dialog control? Or the oft-complained about boot time for most everything? Or the time it takes almost any program to load up the first time you load it?
Anyone else think it's time to start over, and not just assume the fater and faster machines can deal with the laziness we program into the systems we build?
M@
Krispy Cream is people