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

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.

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: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.