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Top 500 Supercomputers Ranked
Shadow Wrought writes "The Register is reporting on (alternate ZDNet article) the latest list of the top 500 supercomputers in the world. Top of the list is the Earth Simulator Center in Yokohama, Japan, with a benchmark performance of 35.86 Tflop/s. HP and IBM claim 159 and 158 of the systems respectively. I wonder how many teraflops Deep Thought could have done?"
Interesting to note is that #3, #6, and #8 are all linux clusters. All three of which are at Livermore.
Cray's X1 also debuted, but it was much lower @112. However, it ought to be noted, that the examples out so far are only 60 processors at tops. As soon as the money gets ponied up, prolly at ORNL, they'll be waaaay up towards the top. My guess is, if all goes as planned, they'll be at #15 by year's end.
What I find exciting these days is actually the High Productivity Computing Systems Effort, the Blue Planet or Blue Gene. These are a little ways off from being on the Top500 list yet though. :D
I do wish there were more SC companies doing hardware development in the US. I love Cray, but a single vendor smacks of eggs in one backet syndrome...So, geeks, if ya wanna start a startup with a design, go for it...Betcha the NSA (aka Cthuhlu of HPC) would be happy to sponsor ya...;)
Do you know why the road less traveled by is littered with the bones of the unwary?
The difference in manufacturing in Japan and the US are another extension of the cultural differences. (I believe)
For instance, in Japan many manufacturers are creating smaller devices, something that hits the market has to be smaller and more "efficent" (not costing lots of Yen in overhead) This is something typical of the Japanese culture. For example, you won't see some Japanese Guy driving around in an Escalade with his girlfriend, "just cause" You'd more likely find some Japanese Guy driving around in a Honda Hybrid car, cause it's cheaper to run than most cars, even though the price sucks.
Meanwhile, in the States, people want more POWER! They want the big ass SUV that crushes other cars, and small animals. The same goes with the computers. Something big and fast, regardless of the power consumption or general overhead of the machine.
Therefore, the target markets in the two countries are much different, so the products of the two will also be much different.
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I'd find it fascinating to see a breakdown of the languages used to write the applications which are running on these beasties. High Performance Computing has rather different needs from a language than programs that are, say, focused on interaction with a user, or database access. I expect that languages which sit well with infrastructures such as MPI and Open MP would be well-favoured, and I wouldn't be surprised to find that FORTRAN puts in a respectable showing.
And before I'm bombarded with comments pointing out how ancient FORTRAN is, it's worth remembering that FORTRAN is still an evolving language; the last updade came out in 1997/98, and the new FORTRAN 200x should be arriving within the next year or so. In my experience of a number of languages, I've found that FORTRAN still continues to excel at numerical efficiency and portability, and I hope these selling points continue to be a feature of the new standard. Of course, I wouldn't want to write a compiler in FORTRAN, but for stuff like computational fluid dynamics, it still rocks; and those aspects of FORTRAN 77 which made it awkward (such as lack of dynamic array allocation) are fortunately a thing of the distant past.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.