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

Kudos to the Mac

[Space cowboy]

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

Scant details on supercomputers...

[Spoing]

The Top 500 supercomputer list does provide the basic comparison information, though nothing like OS used or IO speed (network and storage). For that, you have to dig through each site and even then it is not easy to find. (The Earth Simulator uses SUPER-UX for the OS -- another Unix tuned to this type of task.)

That said, for what is provided, the Earth Simulator seems to be the current king by about 2x. (Corrections appreciated.)

Check the #5 and #6

[Jesrad]

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.

Re:Check the #5 and #6

[tychay]

No, VT did not do a lot of "assembly-level hacking" one man working two months did port a bunch of code and he did use the best compiler and LINPAK on the market (Professor Goto's libraries). If LANL didn't do the same or better, I'd be disappointed.

Also you keep harping on the fact that it was "self-assembled." But then you go on to compare it to a system not provided by IBM, HP, NEC, or Cray but one provided by Linux Networx. Perhaps if VA Tech had gone to them, Linux Networx might have beat out IBM's Opteron bid of $9-10 million. But could have they gotten as low as $4.2 million--the list price from Apple?

You're going to have to face the hard reality that the Opteron may be an integer demon but the IBM 970 has it beat handily in floating point. The Rpeak of the 2Ghz Opteron (2 Gflops/s) is 1/2 that of the 2Ghz 970 (4 Gflops/s). Even accounting for the fact that the Rpeak->Rmax dropoff might be larger for the 970, that's too much to make up. Also, Virginia Tech considered the Opteron, but found that at the performance they wanted (specifically floating point performance) the systems would have cost twice as much ($9-10 million instead of $4 million) which is why the correctly opted for the 970 and which is why they're #3 instead of #6.

And that's without using Altivec/VMX/Velocity, since that unit can't do double precision add-mults.

As for heat issues. The 2Ghz 970 uses 47 watts which puts it approximately 1/2 the heat of a Pentium 4 and significantly less than the Opteron. IBM will be selling 2x1.6Ghz 970's in a blade configuration early next year and I'm sure "heat" isn't the reason for the delay. The issue with G5s in a 1U rackmount is that they won't exist until 1Q 2004 and it came down to availability. If you did any reading on the subject, you'd find that Virginia Tech's first choice was actually 970 systems from IBM, but they wouldn't be available in time--same thing happenned to the Dell Itanium 2 bid (it could have also been cost, Dell was "exploring pricing options"). The IBM Opteron bid was too high as was the HP Itanium 2 bid so they opted for Apple after the announcement. Smart move, two months of coding and several hundred pizzas later they have the #3 supercomputer. Any compromize, NCSA's gigantic P4 cluster would have beat them out.

What's the difference?

[mindstrm]

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....

Its also the CHEAPEST

[goombah99]

Mac has never been known for being cheap, just a good value. Now even this seems to be fading: macs are a cheap too!

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.

Re:Its also the CHEAPEST

[MrTangent]

"The machine is the first supercomputer based on Macs; it is one of the few supercomputers built entirely from off-the-shelf components and it cost a bargain-bucket price -- only $5.2 million. By comparison, most of the top 10 supercomputers cost about $40 million and up. The Earth Simulator cost $350 million."

The Earth Simulator is #1 on the Top 500 list as seen here. Quote taken from here.

"The $200 million (US$) computer is the fifth in the DOE's nuclear weapons simulation program, called Advanced Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI), which allows the U.S. to keep its nuclear stockpile while complying with the nuclear test-ban treaty. Named "ASCI Q," the newest supercomputer will be capable of performing 30 trillion calculations per second.*"

Taken from here.

So, the #1 Supercomputer, the Earth Simulator, cost $350 million. The #2 Supercomputer, the ASCI Q, cost $100 million. The #3 Supercomputer, the Big Mac, cost a mere $5.2 million.

*Looks like ASCI Q got only 13.88 trillion calculations per second, not 30.

Re:Internet distributed computing

[gcondon]

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.

Can someone tell me...

[Whatah]

Why does every product apple make have its own icon ?

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 ?

Re:Internet distributed computing

[netwiz]

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.