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."

Comments

Re:It seems like the Apple Mac.....

[ikekrull]

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.