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

already official

[Anonymous Coward]

Clicky for the official November list

Re:Trademark infringement

[lost_it]

Virginia Tech has not (and will not) call the computer "Big Mac". BBC used the name when it first started appearing in the news, and everyone else picked it up, IIRC.

The people in charge of the cluster don't want to call it "Big Mac" because (1) they don't want a lawsuit from McDonalds, and (2) who wants to be associated with nasty, greasy fast food?

They've worked out a solid candidate for a name (it's not official yet) that isn't quite as catchy as "Big Mac", but it also doesn't have any of the downsides.

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....

my switcher story

[caffeine_monkey]

I used to run an Intel-based supercomputer, but then one night, I was modelling a nuclear explosion on it, and all of a sudden it went berserk, the screen started flashing, and the model just disappeared. All of it. And it was a good model of a nuclear explosion! I had to cram and remodel it really quickly. Needless to say, my rushed model wasn't nearly as good, and I blame that Intel supercomputer for the fact that DARPA yanked our funding.

Re:Kudos to the Mac (don't forget the others)

[tychay]

Hmm, guess this means my submission a couple hours ago won't go through (dangit, Wired!)...

Here is the official press release and the list.

There is a lot of good points to note all around. The first is the G5 Terascale cluster at Virginia Tech at #3 (10.28 Tflops/s, 2200 CPU, Infiniband) is the first academic computer to break 10 teraflops/s. This extra performance was promised at Mac OS X Developer's conference last month. Not to sure if the price is a testament to Infiniband ($1.5 million cabling, cards, and routers) or the Macs ($4.2 million list).

Good thing too because in a surprise move the NCSA cluster made the list at #4 (9.82Tflops/s, 2500 CPU, Myrinet). This cluster is built using Dell's running Pentium 4 XEONs and Red Hat Linux! One subtle point to note is that they didn't get all the systems online in time (there should be 2900 CPUs, not 2500). I bet some programmer at PSC and an ex-Chief Scientist of SDSC is appreciating having a hand in edging out NCSA for #3--not to mention Apple beating Dell for #3.

The fastest Itanium cluster is at #5 (8.63 TFlops/s, 1936 CPU, Quadrics) which is looking like the odd man out boxed in by a PC based systems using Myrinet, the P4 Xeon above, and the most powerful Opteron system at #6 (8.05 Tflops/s, 2816 CPU, Myrinet). Another point of similarity:did I mention it's also using Linux?

And finally, It's easy to overlook #73, a single compute node of BlueGene/L (1.44 Tflops/s, 1024 CPU). Imagine 128 of these connected together and you have something that will easily take #1 when it's completed even if we handicap it 20-40%. As noted on SlashDot earlier, this will be running Linux.

Infiniband, not G5

[binkleym]

The G5 is a cool processor, but it isn't the reason the VT cluster is so fast, the Infiniband interconnect is. The LINPACK benchmark that is used to determine position on the Top 500 list depends very strongly on the latency of the network connection.

Infiniband has ~ 8-12 us latency (probably even less by now), while ethernet is an order of magnitude slower. In real-life applications it's actually worse than this suggests.

We have tested a real-life application (socorro) using both gigabit ethernet and Myrinet (slightly slower than Infiniband), and gigE took 600 seconds to finish a run, while Myrinet took 4.

VT's cluster is using the largest Infiniband network yet built (or at least announced). The previous largest Infiniband network was O(100) machines. VT could have built the cluster using Xeons, Itaniums, or Opterons and arrived at roughly the same level of performance.

Re:Check the #5 and #6

[The Infamous Grimace]

"...Then, as you have read it, you can tell the world how you do this "low-overhead software error correction to compensate for the non-ECC memory"..."

Taken directly from interview with Srinidhi Varadarajan:

Q: How do you deal with Error Correction in Memory?

A: There's a lot of traffic on Ars Technica and other places. We do failure recovery, memory doesn't report. One of the things we've noticed is that failures aren't an issue yet. The reason they can be competent is the LINPACK test, which is showing 16 digits of accuracy. We are planning on moving to ECC systems in the future. They may have to run things twice for a bit.

(tig)