Big Mac Officially Ranks 3rd

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.

Comments

Brute Force supercomputing = meh

[Boone^]

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.

G5, not Xeons, Itaniums, or Opterons

[2nd Post!]

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.