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Big Mac Officially Ranks 3rd

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the thats-a-lotta-mips dept.

An anonymous reader noted that according to Wired, it will be announced officially on Monday the Big Mac supercomputer is the third-fastest super-computer. The article also talks about some of the amazing supercomputers in the planning stages. The sort of stuff that will make Big Mac look like that old TI-85 collecting dust in your drawer.

4 of 357 comments (clear)

  1. Internet distributed computing by ergo98 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Given the basic benchmarks used to rank supercomputers, could a cluster of loosely coupled machines compete, or is the bandwidth demands for the benchmark set too demanding? I'm just curious how projects like what is detailed at distributed.net compare: 1100 dual-processor macs would be vastly outranked by the hundreds of thousands (or millions) of PCs taking part in distributed processing for various code cracking or cancer curing purposes.

  2. Congratulations VTech by gsdali · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Now to get on with the research. It's a credit to them that this computer got from the drawing board to fruition in the tiny amount of time that it did. It's raised the bar for price/performance in the research computing world and hopefully many less wealthy institutions (I'm looking at UK universities especially here). At the end of the day its about the research they put into it and the results they get out of it.

  3. Brute Force supercomputing = meh by Boone^ · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Run down the list and look at processor counts. We've got 5120 at the top (vector), but number 2 needed 8192 to get the job done. BigMac at #3 drops to 2200 and the processor counts hover in that 2000+ category. Until #19, when Cray's X1 jumps in at 252 processors.

    Having a fast computer is cool and all, but if you can do it with 252 CPUs instead of 1024 (#22, P4 2.4), isn't that a win?

    Besides, LINPACK doesn't stress interconnect latency and bandwidth, only cache and memory performance. When you run a "real" codes on these Mac/Xeon clusters and get 5% efficiency, suddenly the Earth Simulator (and the small Cray X1's) look good when they blow well past the 50% efficiency mark.

  4. G5, not Xeons, Itaniums, or Opterons by 2nd+Post! · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Yes, you're quite right, the networking hardware is important.

    But as researched by the VT folk, the G5 is significant: It was cheaper for their needs than the Xeons, Itaniums, and Opterons of similar performance and energy consumption!

    So both component choices were critical to their achieving number 3.

    --

    GPL Deconstructed