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?"

Comments

isn't the answer obvious?

[sweeney37]

I wonder how many teraflops Deep Thought could have done?

42.

Mike

atari

[chimpo13]

Where does the Atari 2600 rank? First or second?

Re:atari

[Anonymous Coward]

I want a cluster of 2600's running a high-res version of ET.

Deepthought

[Duncan3]

Since it was a chess computer, I'd say it could probably do about 0.000 FLOPS.

Re:Deepthought

[lostchicken]

For those who don't get it, chess computers don't really deal with floating point math, but are dependent upon integer calculations. So their FLOPS scores are very low while their MIPS scores are outstanding.

Sigh

[Qweezle]

I guess for the third straight year my ultrafast 17 kiloflop TI-83 calculator didn't make the list... :sigh:

Apple Macs

[rebeka thomas]

I wonder when the first mac user will claim a G5 should be on the list Typical bigoted zealots.

Re:Apple Macs

[stoolpigeon]

First- here is the answer.

second: being modded down is the confirmation of your post- if they hadn't you would have been wrong. It was worth it. If I hadn't just burned my last point i'd have modded you back up.

Not hosted on one...

[Anonymous Coward]

My thinking is that the list of top 500 supercomputers isn't hosted on such a machine...

How dare you!

[JVert]

I'm posting from a duron right now you insensitive clod!

Deep Thought

[nother_nix_hacker]

I wonder how many teraflops Deep Thought could have done?"

Who cares, I wonder what the fps in quake 3 would be! :)

Re:Deep Thought

[gnovos]

I wonder how many teraflops Deep Thought could have done?"

Who cares, I wonder what the fps in quake 3 would be! :)

You wouldn't like the result...

Deep thought, I want to play qua....

Done! You would have gotten 32 frags and your friend would have gotten 38. You would lose. Would you like to play again? No, don't answer that, I already know. DONE! This time you would have beaten your friend by 4 frags.

Imagine a beow. . . .

[romec]

Well someone was going to say it. . .
I think that they should add their web server as an honorable mention because I can still connect to it (it took a while) despite the /. effect

Re:They would go back in time

[infinite9]

What if there were a beowulf cluster of the top 500 supercomputers?
You'd still be modded down.

Here's a thought

[coolmacdude]

I bet if I buy 10 new Dual 2 Ghz G5s and cluster them I could make that list.

Re:Here's a thought

[coult]

Actually the G5 has dual floating point units, which means it can do 2 double-precision floating point ops per cycle (maximum)...and technically speaking the altivec can do 4 single-precision floating point ops per second, which would allow for a theoretical peak of 16 GFlops per machine. Of course the actual performance would be lower, especially in a cluster. I don't think you'd need 123 machines though.

The Top 10

[Anonymous Coward]

The site may rank Supercomputers, but obviously doesn't run on one :) It's already chugging. Here's a straight, unformatted, copy and paste of the top 10:

1 NEC
Earth-Simulator/ 5120 35860.00
40960.00 Earth Simulator Center
Japan/2002
2 Hewlett-Packard
ASCI Q - AlphaServer SC ES45/1.25 GHz/ 8192 13880.00
20480.00 Los Alamos National Laboratory
USA/2002
3 Linux Networx
MCR Linux Cluster Xeon 2.4 GHz - Quadrics/ 2304 7634.00
11060.00 Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
USA/2002
4 IBM
ASCI White, SP Power3 375 MHz/ 8192 7304.00
12288.00 Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
USA/2000
5 IBM
SP Power3 375 MHz 16 way/ 6656 7304.00
9984.00 NERSC/LBNL
USA/2002
6 IBM
xSeries Cluster Xeon 2.4 GHz - Quadrics/ 1920 6586.00
9216.00 Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
USA/2003
7 Fujitsu
PRIMEPOWER HPC2500 (1.3 GHz)/ 2304 5406.00
11980.00 National Aerospace Laboratory of Japan
Japan/2002
8 Hewlett-Packard
rx2600 Itanium2 1 GHz Cluster - Quadrics/ 1540 4881.00
6160.00 Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
USA/2003
9 Hewlett-Packard
AlphaServer SC ES45/1 GHz/ 3016 4463.00
6032.00 Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center
USA/2001
10 Hewlett-Packard
AlphaServer SC ES45/1 GHz/ 2560 3980.00
5120.00 Commissariat a l'Energie Atomique (CEA)
France/2001

Re:The Top 10

[Aardpig]

From this list, would I be correct in thinking that no Microsoft products (i.e., operating systems) run on these ultra high-end machines? Or, to paraphrase what I really mean (and in the interests of honesty), does Windows suck like a Dyson when it comes to High-Performance Computing?

Re:The Top 10

[TheViffer]

Microsoft PR

Because of their ground-breaking work with Velocity, CTC was recognized in Washington by ComputerWorld and the Smithsonian American History Museum and was made part of the Smithsonianâ(TM)s permanent research collection. Velocity was also named to the list of the top 500 most powerful computers in the world. This was a watershed event since it was the first Windows 2000-based system to obtain this ranking and one of only two Windows-based systems to place on the list.

So in the list thier is another.

Re:The Top 10

[shfted!]

There is a notible lack of ASCI systems built with Power4 chips. I wonder how long until IBM will build one with them?

Alternate site

[Dynamoo]

A similar presentation of the data can be found here cuz the main one has just gotten Slashdotted.

Never mind Teraflops, we should have a measure of web server load called "Slashdots".

American Dominance in Supercomputers

[reporter]

Before anyone says that Japan is "ahead" of the USA again, let me quell any doubts about the superiority of American computer technology. The technology to build a HPC (high-performance computing) computer is identical to the technology to build a commercial computer. American companies have been increasingly focused on building commercial computers because that is where the profits are -- especially after the end of the cold war.

The NEC Earth Simulator is really just a different optimization point in the computer-design space. Huge amounts of bandwidth to memory and specialized vector-processing units tied to the processor core. The VLSI technology that NEC used to build these system is readily employed by Intel and IBM. So, if the latter companies wanted to build the world's fastest HPC computer, they could.

The 21st century is not PaxAsia. It is PaxAmericana. The hordes of immigrants flooding into this country to get the hell out of Asia should have been a big hint.

Re:American Dominance in Supercomputers

[agent dero]

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.

Re:American Dominance in Supercomputers

[netsharc]

The 21st century is not PaxAsia. It is PaxAmericana. The hordes of immigrants flooding into this country to get the hell out of Asia should have been a big hint.

Gee whiz, what a grand conclusion from a simplistic argument. I wonder why people still find USA attractive, I come from the world's largest Muslim country (not Muslim myself), and I wouldn't want to go to a country where I would immediately be seen as a suspect terrorist and where your Agent Smiths can arrest me for just because I'm foreign. I don't even think they'll let me in if I wanted to visit the goddamn country. The same fate is suffered by a lot of students and scientists who study in the US and had helped the US to be the great technological nation that it currently is. Here's the article which mentions that fact, but I don't think you'd be able to read it - it's in German and you don't seem like someone who'd learn a foreign language.

That seems to be only a small, unimportant part of the US's big problem. Afghanistan is going to hell again, Iraq is still in chaos, and billions of your taxpayer money is being used in trying to stop that chaos, chaos which Bush created in hopes of rewards that he isn't going to share with you, because they're all going into his and his friend's and family's pockets.

Yea, vote Republican!

I must be looking at too many porn/warez sites

[zapp]

Anyone else get the instant urge to close the window (thinking it was a popup) when they saw the host www.top500.org?

Changes?

[MightyPalm]

I don't see any major changes in this list compared to the one that has been up for almost 6 months. Only a couple of the computers on top25 has been been build this year. I'm certainly looking forward to see some new top placements in the near future (anyone know of something which might appear soon?). btw. the server isn't too fast, even when it's not slashdotted.

Some thoughts...

[anzha]

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...;)

The top 500 unclassified supercomputers

[mikeophile]

What I want to see is the list amended to include the iron that agencies like the FBI, CIA, NSA, and less well known acronyms are using.

Re:The top 500 unclassified supercomputers

[hawkstone]

#2 (Q at LANL) and #4 (White at LLNL), and others, are doing classified work, but they're still on this list. But you're pretty much right if you meant that these are all unclassified architectures.

Interestingly, though, things the NSA has wouldn't be likely to show up on this list, as the benchmarks are suited towards MPP style machines. NSA is more likely to have vector machines than large numbers of scalar processors.

Re:The top 500 unclassified supercomputers

[sysjkb]

An alternative list of supercomputers is (or perhaps "was") kept by Gunter at GAPCON. He ranks sites, as opposed to individual systems. Unfortunatly, the site seems to be down right now, but the ever helpful google cache (search for "gapcon supercomputer") put the NSA at #4, behind the Japan Marine Science Center, LLNL and LANL.

12475.7 - (09-JAN-2002) [NSA]
National Security Agency,Fort Meade,Maryland,US
1) Cray X1-3/192 2457.6
2) Cray T3E-1200E LC1900 2280
3) Cray T3E-900 LC1324 1191.6
4) SGI 2800/250-2304 1152
5) HP SuperDome/552-512 1130.5
6) Cray T3E-1350 LC800 1080
7) SGI 3800/400-1064 851.2
8) Cray T3E-1200E LC540 648
9) Cray T3E-1200E LC540 648
10) Cray T3E-1200E LC540 648
11) Cray T3E-1200 LC404 484.8
12) Cray T3E-1200 LC284 340.8

I think much of his information comes out of press releases, leaks, submissions, etc. The record for the NSA hadn't been updated for a while, but this may give you an idea of what they might have been running not very long ago.

The modern stuff is all well and good, but what's really fascinating is his list of the top computing sites in 1956. (Or search google for 1956 computing sites and click on the cache.) Here's the top two. Rating is in OPS:

583733.3 - [ONR]
Office of Naval Research,Arlington,Virginia,US
1) MIT Whirlwind 1 500000
2) ERA Atlas 2 83333.3
3) ERA 1101 200
4) ERA Atlas 1 200

253787.8 - [MIT]
MIT,Cambridge,Massachusetts,US
1) MIT TX-0 166666.7
2) MIT Whirlwind 2 45454.4
3) IBM 704 41666.7

Note that the supreme super-computer of that era, the Whirlwind, is quite a bit slower than your pocket calculator.

Yours truly,
Jeffrey Boulier

Highest TFlops in one location

[eericson]

My question to anyone out there that might now is what location has the highest computing resources. Looking at the list, it seems like Lawrence Livermore has at least 3 systems in the top 50, and more from there on down.

Anyone have a toal available resources in one location list?

-E2

If things were different in the 80's...

[lscotte]

This list would probably have been dominated by elxsi, Connection Machines, and Crays, if things had been different.

I never saw a live CM or Cray, but I did play on an elxsi, and it was a pretty hot system for it's time.

Re:We're on the edge

[msgmonkey]

Well it depends, when you're talking about your average desktop computer the quoted FLOPS or MIPS are usually useless because the supporting architecure does n't have bandwidth to supply the processor the data at that speed, they are normally based on data that is in cache memory.

Supercomputers are designed with high bandwidth in mind and thats why in general their FLOPS are taken with less of a pinch of salt.

My Rig

[Anonymous Coward]

Sheesh, I wonder why my rig didn't make it into the top 500 either?

I've spend a lot on a window, neon lights, fancy cooling systems, and STICKERS.. so many that I should rank atleast 354 out of 500!! It even sounds fast from all the chassis fans!

Maybe I need to go for the rear mounted spoiler to break onto the list??

The answer to Deep Thoughts speed!

[Anonymous Coward]

Given:
Deep Thought spent 6,500,000 yrs designing the earth, which then failed to produce the desired results. ( Admittedly not due to design flaws but still a failure. )

Conclusion:
1.53846153e-6 Terra Flops per Year.

What language?

[Aardpig]

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.

Re:We're on the edge

[smitty45]

If you don't have any idea of why FLOPs aren't meaningless, then you haven't ever run a program/problem/simulation on these machines able to put the numbers into context for you.

I spent 4 years running dynamic finite element analysis simulations on alot of the kinds of these parallel monsters, and when FLOPs indicate numbers that reflect quite well the length of time it would take for a run to finish, you realize that benchmarks ARE useful, in the right context.

I need a sticker...

[EverDense]

I need a sticker for my PC case that says "My OTHER computer is the Earth Simulator".
Once I've got that I'll be beating the girls off with a stick.
As apposed to my current "beating off" activities.

Re:I need a sticker...

[sean23007]

I sincerely hope the guys in Japan put a sticker on the side of the Earth Simulator that says "My other computer is also the Earth Simulator". Jerks.

(Hitchhikers Guide)

Re:I need a sticker...

[Andrewkov]

Nah, it probably says "Powered by Honda" followed by a VTEC sticker.

Deep thoughts...

[gnovos]

I wonder what exactly defines a "supercomputer". Wouldn't SETI@Home count? Or in a more abstract sense, all of Slashdot... Except, I suppose, where normal supercomputers are designed to model the destruction of the universe, the "Slashdot machine" is designed to cause it.

You have never been to japan

[gnovos]

For example, you won't see some Japanese Guy driving around in an Escalade with his girlfriend, "just cause".

Ironically, it's quite a common sight to see Japanese kids driving around in huge American monsters -- with the steering wheel on the wrong side for Japan even! -- "just cause" they think it looks cool.

Re:You have never been to japan

[pao93]

I agree. I hate it when people speculate about the Japanese young people. Yeah, maybe you see some dorky salaryman driving around in Hybrid. But if it's a young cool guy who likes cars, they'll be driving some monster classic from the US (slightly rare but not uncommon) or a heavily modded, suped up domestic car. Lots of Van type things with wings (?!). Lots of big station wagony cars. Lots of flashing lights. To insinuate that the dudes in these cars have to be Yakuza is fucking pointless. I have a good friend (Japanese) who loves classic american cars and has a huge old 69 Chevy.

I nominate Pink

[DeathPenguin]

Pink is the largest LinuxBIOS cluster in the world to date. The only moving parts in each node are cooling fans. This translates into a small savings on hardware, but more importantly means the nodes are by design more reliable thanks to fewer moving parts. Each node is powered by two 2.4GHz Xeon processors with four gigs of RAM and Myrinet 2000 interconnects.

The raw hardware power, while impressive, isn't what makes this cluster unique. The kicker is in the software, more specifically Clustermatic 3 featuring LinuxBIOS. Stuff happens and nodes fail, but thanks to LinuxBIOS they can be back up in a matter of seconds, not minutes.

Additional tools for the frontend node from Linux Networx makes updating nodes super-easy. You can flash each node's BIOS with a single command all in a matter of seconds. BProc allows you to run basic shell commands on any node without even installing a distribution on those nodes. w00t!

What we see here is a big shift away from expensive hardware and proprietary software. The software powering this cluster is 100% GPL, so users save a fortune in software licensing costs alone. And while these P4 nodes in particular aren't exactly cheap, they provide pretty darn good power and are far less expensive than Alpha servers. Also, using the x86 architecture means that consumer boards are not far behind in clustering. In fact, you can check out the LinuxBIOS homepage and see some pretty cheap boards that are supported already. So if you have some spare cash lying around and a couple weekends to kill, you can pick up a cheap board + cpu + memory combo and set it up as a slave node for your desktop machine with the same software these guys use to power this huge cluster.

Re:I nominate Pink

[DeathPenguin]

In many clusters today, each node relies on a hard disk to hold a distribution. This is a real big problem because hard disks generate a lot of heat. This is especially true with 10-15K RPM SCSI drives.

To add to that, most cluster node manufacturers that I know of design their 1U cases so that the hard disks are mounted on the front of the case for hot-swapping (Which in itself should suggest that people have problems with drives failing). The fans lie somewhere behind the hard disks. For example, this is a picture of an Appro 1122H dual Opteron server. Some cool air (But not a lot) is drawn from the vents on the front-right of the case, but a lot of hot air gets sucked away from the hard disks and blown over the CPUs. A better solution is just to take out the hot swap bays, make sure there's no SCSI backplane in the way, and let the cool air be drawn in from all across the front.

There are some manufacturers who will put a cardboard heat tunnel around the intake vent, lead it over some blowers, and eventually have to run over the CPUs. That's good design for keeping the CPUs cool, but it basically leaves the hard disks and other components such as north bridge chips and memory modules to fend for themselves when it comes to fighting thermal death. Often times they fail.

I have yet to see a hard disk that was smart enough to spin down to a lower speed when it reached a certain temperature. Even if they were that smart, who wants an HDD performing poorly when you've already spent ungodly amounts of money for bleeding edge 15K ultra-320 drives? As far as I'm concerned, they're practically built to destroy themselves. This is why diskless cluster nodes are so appealing to me.

Sorry for my little rant there. I hope it helped to clarify what I meant when I was emphasizing the advantages of having fewer moving parts.

Correction

[istartedi]

The article should read "Top 500 Supercomputes that we know about Ranked".

Wouldn't you love to know what the NSA uses to crack 128-bit keys? Ever wonder if the solution to RSA-1024 is just laying around in their files somewhere, the employees who know about it sworn to secrecy?

Re:Tflops/s

[TeknoHog]

A trillion floating point operations per second per second?

It's called hardware acceleration.

Or perhaps it's the rate at which computers need to speed up constantly in order to run Office.

FLOPS are cool...

[charlie763]

Wouldn't it make more sense for processors to be rated based upon their FLOP count? I mean; buying one base upon MHz is like buying a car based upon it's rpm rating.

And is there any program (preferably linux) out there that will do a benchmark test on my computer in FLOPS?

Re:They would go back in time

[rjoseph]

Uhm...what about me?

It's number 90 on the new list (was number 85 when it first came out), is entirely self-built by members of the theoretical astrophysics group here at LANL, and (in re: to a comment below) we've even been able to convince LANL to categorize it as a single computer, instead of 294 smaller ones.

So there you have it, Beowulf in the Top 500.

Wonder where the F@H network would rank

[CracktownHts]

With 80,000 active processors it ought to be up there with the best of them. Too bad it doesn't meet the definition of "supercomputer".

SETI@HOME is actually #2, with 27TFLOPS

[billstewart]

The second-fastest supercomputer in the world is SETI@HOME, which averages about 27 TFLOPS these days. That's still slower than Japan's Earth Simulator, which is 35 TFLOPS, but it's twice as fast as the Weapons Of Mass Destruction Labs's fastest machine (13.8 TFLOPS), which is about double the speed of Another Weapons of Mass Desctuction Lab's Evil Linux Cluster. So

1. The World's Fastest Computer is trying to figure out this planet,
2. The World's Second-Fastest Computer is a volunteer effort to figure out if anybody's on other planets, cure cancer, and do other good things on this planet, and
3. The Next Fastest Four Computers are trying to figure out how to blow up this planet.

Re:SETI@HOME is actually #2, with 27TFLOPS

[Noren]

Sorry to interrupt a rant with actual facts, but...

LANL and LLNL have actually done research on cancer, unlike SETI@HOME which has done no work at all on cancer.

The University of California is currently a 'Key Sponsor' of SETI@HOME and its Berkeley campus is home to the SETI researchers who set up and use SETI@HOME. The University of California also currently operates both LANL and LLNL.

I'm not familiar with Evil Linux, is it anything like Red Hat?

Hard to Tell Operating Systems...

[billstewart]

The Second Fastest Supercomputer, which isn't on the list, is SETI@HOME, with ~27TFLOPS, and most of the machines it's running on are Windows. Most of the machines don't say what OS they're running, but most of them are running some kind of hacked-up operating system to coordinate communications and tasks. The problem with Windows in this environment isn't whether it sucks, but that it's not open to hacking and customization to anywhere near the extent that most Unix OS relatives are (except apparently SCO, which has trouble running networks on /dev/lawsuit.)

Also, Windows wants to run on something that looks at least *vaguely* like a PC. Some of these supercomputers look like PCs with odd network peripherals underneath them, some look like clusters of multi-processor shared-memory PCs (sometimes with too many processors for Windows) with a communications layer between clusters. Some of these work ok for Windows (SETI, for instance), while others are too different.

Also, the communications patterns between nodes and between common applications programs are highly critical here. The tighter the coupling, and the finer-grained the parallelism, the harder it is to fit into whatever framework the operating system provides. Loosely-coupled systems can work just fine on Microsoft; very-tightly-coupled systems need more hacking. And a large part of the Windows plaform is really focused on desktop graphics applications, which simply aren't relevant for supercomputers. (There are people doing clusters with game consoles, such as the Sony Playstation, but that's because they want to use the fast parallel CPU in the graphics engine, not the boring CPU.)

NSA's Computers

[billstewart]

There's occasional speculation about this sort of thing. For crypto applications themselves, FLOPS don't matter - integer processing and bitmap-bashing do, and it's possible that they've built themselves some efficient DES-crackers or other crypto engines. I doubt that most of those would be Cray-like vector processors - it's more of a job for dataflow architectures and lots of parallelism.

But the big floating-point applications that NSA has are likely to be signal-processors like Echelon which are trolling for voice signals and such, which is a good match for large numbers of scalar processors. How tightly they're integrated depends on the conveniences of signal collection, which is beyond my ability to speculate credibly :-)