Slashdot Mirror
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.
It has to be said that Mac's haven't been famous for their speed, always pushing the "it does more", or "there are 2 procs" arguments, but this gives them some serious ammunition. Perhaps they'll even get their advert on the air in the UK now :-)
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
That said, for what is provided, the Earth Simulator seems to be the current king by about 2x. (Corrections appreciated.)
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
The Top500 site lists two competing 64bits architectures-based clusters: the Integrity rx2600, with 1938 Itanium2 at 1.5GHz (must be pricey), and an 2816 Opteron 2 GHz cluster, that achieves only three fourths of Big Mac's performance. Now that's a defeat for AMD.
Also, the VirginiaTech cluster is the only "self-made" supercomputer in the Top50 (the next one is ranked 63th, based on SunFire V60). The original #3 slipped to the 7th position because of the new supercomputers. Competition for that third place was tough !
Now where's the G5 XServe ? It was supposed to be out when OS X Server 10.3 was released.
Maybe we deserve this world ?
There are some other interesting semi-commodity hardware based new additions to the top 500 right under VT's #3 slot.
BigMac is certainly impressive, but even if these systems can't quite match it's scores, they deserve a mention.
4
NCSA
United States/2003
Tungsten
PowerEdge 1750, P4 Xeon 3.06 GHz, Myrinet / 2500
Dell
9819 Rmax
15300 Rpeak
5
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
United States/2003
Mpp2
Integrity rx2600 Itanium2 1.5 GHz, Quadrics / 1936
HP
8633 Rmax
11616 Rpeak
6
Los Alamos National Laboratory
United States/2003
Lightning
Opteron 2 GHz, Myrinet / 2816
Linux Networx
8051 Rmax
11264 Rpeak
"The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
I mean, I understand reasonably well the benchmarks used... but my question is this:
In the past, we always looked to the DoE or DoD for who had the fastest computers... they had stuff we could only dream of.. huge, fast clusters of funky computers we've never heard of.
Now, a university built one out of macs... and it competes with the same benchmarks.
What I wonder is, are there applications the old-style supercomputers are still better at, or has technology simply advanced since then? (Things like 10gig ethernet and ghz processors and memory busses, etc)... have we simply surpassed them? Don't just feed me some line about I/O either....
Now this system is the cheapest of the top 10. its cheaper than many it beat by a factor fo ten (more than that considering some of the building infrastructure are in that figure). Even more interesting these were stock mac at full price loaded with DVD-roms, firewire, blue tooth, the OS, etc..---not some stripped down model.
Its a good bet too that this thing is going to have lower maintainence costs and higher up-time given the macs attention to cooling, the use of high quality hard drives and power supplies, and high end memory chips. (on our cluster a tenth that size we blew 60 hard drives in the first 6 months and had to replace 10% of the motherboards.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Okay, I took your advice and looked at the distributed.net speed statistics. I looked for the fastest PowerPC & Intel scores in each project. Here's what I found ...
PROJECT OGR:
CPU @ MHz = Speed
G5 @ 2000 = 19,180,166.00
G5 @ 1800 = 17,100,000.00
G4 @ 1250 = 13,946,216.25
P4 @ 3200 = 12,155,245.00
Xeon @ 2800 = 10,251,811.00
PIII @ 1440 = 9,570,000.00
PROJECT RC572:
G5 @ 2000 = 15,058,974.67
G5 @ 1800 = 13,400,000.00
G4 @ 1250 = 13,084,678.25
P4 @ 3200 = 4,502,730.00
Xeon @ 2800 = 3,935,299.00
PIII @ 1440 = 2,927,187.00
Of course, these numbers need to be taken with a grain of salt since there is only a few (or even one) top-end machine of each class in the statistics. However, contrary to your assertion, it appears that the PowerPCs kick ass compared to the x86s.
My understanding was that, if anything, the distributed.net algorithms unfairly favor the PowerPCs - esp. those with Altivec. I believe the Apple has used that fact in their advertising much to the consternation of many Slashdotters.
Good thing too because in a surprise move the NCSA cluster made the list at #4 (9.82Tflops/s, 2500 CPU, Myrinet).
That's pretty funny. A Pentium cluster with 2,500 CPU's is slower than a Mac cluster with only 2,200 CPU's.
What's also funny is that the hottest competition in supercomputing today is between Apple and Dell. Remember when it was between SGI, NEC, and Cray?
And yet equally, if not more, important products like amd64 don't have their own icons ?
Additionally, why does this CPU have a G5 icon? And not a PPC970 icon ?
Has slashdot sold out to apple ?
I have a TI-89, so *phhhpt* to you.
Seriously, though, a TI-89 (and the TI-92) has a 10 Mhz 68000 CPU with 144 KB of memory. The original Macs had 8 Mhz 68000 CPUs and 128 KB of memory. I won't be the least bit surprised if calculators twenty years from now have the equivalent of 2 Ghz PowerPC 970s and 1 GB of RAM.
If the BlueGene/L interests you, take a look at the next member of the family BlueGene/P (the P means Petaflop). If I recall correctly, the Petaflop version is going to have more than a million processors in it. These computers are pretty much used for biological applications, and are going to benefit from some serious hardware, software, and networking.
P resentation_January_2002.pdf
Here is the project update from a while back, talks a bit about each level of the blue gene project. It also talks about the biological motivations for supercomputing.
http://www.research.ibm.com/bluegene/BG_External_
And more generally, the blugene homepage: http://www.research.ibm.com/bluegene/
-SF
yah, and there's a reason. The Altivec vector instruction set specifically provides an instruction in hardware that the RC5 routines (and most encryption in general) make heavy use of. 1GHz G4 procs kill the Intel hardware by about 3:1 (approx 9mil on the above #s)
That said, the intel hardware should rip thru properly vectorized FP code about as well (for functions it directly supports in hardware), and should kill the G5 on integer performance. Mostly has to do with the G5 having fewer integer units than the P4/Xeon. This has been pretty much proven with the SPEC scores we've seen thus far, with both sides using top-of-class compilers (none of this GCC crap).
And now, back on topic, I think that this says alot about the IBM FP hardware with regards to Intel. Intel bent over backwards for an architecture that's not much faster per clock, and given the apparent lack of clock scalability in the Itanium, they're going to be hard-pressed to keep up. Their lack of FSB bandwidth is going to hurt them as well, esp. in the server market. I know of at least two scientific apps (nothing big, just school stuff) that the Itanium chews thru faster than the G5, but only for small datasets. The guy showing me his results mentioned that when the dataset goes from 10MB to 500MB, the G5 ends up around 2-3 times faster, as the memory interface becomes a bottleneck on Intel.
This may be one of the core reasons LINPACK on hugely parallel systems brings the Itanium and G5 so close to each other.
It doesn't help that the PPC970 looks to cost about a third what the Itanium costs.
The five year old iMac that I am typing this on is running OS X.3 (Panther) very, very well thank you. And, mind you, this is an all-in-one, blueberry iMac. Not a, at the time, top of the line PowerMac.
Your facts are quite off.
While I tend to agree with you that a rack-mounted cpu is generally easier to maintain than a typical PC, I am not so sure about the PowerMac. With the right rack mount you will get the same benefits that you would get from a dedicated rack-mount unit. Slide out the box, pull a switch and drop the side, do the work, raise the side, and slide it back in. The process is the same for both.
Now a typical Intel box set-up is rarely like that (there are exceptions). Their engineering sucks. Getting to parts and pieces is a real pain.
IBM makes the G5 for Apple. It also uses similiar processor in its own machines. And yes, they can cram a lot of them into a small amount of space and still deal with the heat. If you had read the article you might have noticed the following:
Meanwhile, IBM is working on a monster supercomputer that will easily rank as the world's fastest supercomputer when it comes online next year. Blue Gene/L will be capable of performing 360 trillion calculations per second, or 360 teraflops.
Commissioned by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Blue Gene/L will be based on 130,000 processors.
Not only will it be the fastest, but Blue Gene/L will also be the most compact, IBM said.
IBM has managed to cram 1,024 PowerPC 440GX processors into a slanted cabinet the size of a dishwasher. The unit -- described by IBM as a small-scale prototype of Blue Gene/L -- is already ranked 73rd in the new Top500 list.
When finished, Blue Gene/L will be about the size of half a tennis court. "That's very small considering how powerful it is," said IBM spokesman Adam Emery.
By contrast, the Earth Simulator's 5,120 processors would fill four tennis courts.
Lasers Controlled Games!