Slashdot Mirror
Top 500 Supercomputer List Released
sundling writes "The heavily anticipated Top 500 Supercomputer list has been released. There is a Sevenfold increase in AMD Opteron processors on the list. Two sections of an IBM prototype took spots in the top 10 and the famous Apple cluster didn't make the list, because it was out of service for hardware upgrades. When complete, the new IBM cluster is sure to take the top spot from the Earth Simulator."
IBM's new supercomputer will calculate "42" before the Japanese. America can feel good again.
they are not running their site on one of the top 500.
Does nobody see what is about to happen?
Those computers will read that list and know which computers to connect to, to take over the world!!
Doesn't anyone read comics anymore ??
May $DEITY have mercy on us all.
This is the sig that says NI (again)
...oh forget it.
Find funky gifts
Last Thursday there was a little HPC Event by IBM at my University. And apart from the usual Balde Center for Scale Out Computing PR Blurb there also was a 1 Hour Presentation by one of IBM's Senior Strategy Analysts. What i found most interesting how they basically use embedded Processors for Blue Gene due to Cooling and Power Consumption Issues. He talked about Thermal Design, from the Basic Components right to where you compute Heat Dissipation for the whole room so you know where to put the very heat sensitive myrinet/infiniband components.
-- never underestimate someone who overestimates himself
Is that Disney is #57 in the top500, while Weta has the #77 and #80 spots... impressive showing by the entertainment companies.
On the other hand, PDI (Pacific Data Images -- Shrek), Pixar and ILM do not appear in the list, which is also very interesting.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
That's the old trick about multiplying by zero, right?
So how do they measure?
The link didn't work right now so I'll make a guess...
Test must at least include Q3, UT-2004 and 3DMark03, but since these are pretty powerful computers I guess they also use some sort of advanced custom built MineSweeper with like 10.000x10.000 grid playing field or something wild crazy stuff like that.
Maybe 400+ pages Word documents?
Final test is probably Halo for pc. Any fps score above 20 will result in a spot > 100 on the list.
Google cluter not in here? What do you reckon the performance/size of such cluster could be?
main page: http://freecache.org/http://www.top500.org/
2 004/06/
0 04/06/
click view lists: http://freecache.org/http://www.top500.org/lists/
the list: http://freecache.org/http://www.top500.org/list/2
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
Heavily anticipated by whom? I understand that the Superbowl is heavily anticipated. The upcoming US election is heavily anticipated. To a lesser degree, today's SpaceShipOne launch is heavily anticipated. But honestly, are there any people gathering around the water cooler exchanging rumors of who has the edge in cluster network latency this year? (Supercomputer administrators don't count.)
Somebody needs a little perspective...
Does nobody see what is about to happen?
Those computers will read that list and know which computers to connect to, to take over the world!!
WARN
THERE IS ANOTHER SYSTEM
The coolest voice ever.
Maybe we can get everyone at the WWDC to use XGrid and break into the #1 slot for a brief second. Damn, i want Apple to take that spot.
GroupShares Inc - A Free Online Stock Trading Community
-------
artlu.net
At least 5 of the top 10 systems are running Linux, starting at number two with Thunder at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The others are IBM BlueGene/L clusters at places #4 and #8, Tungsten at NCSA at #5, MPP2 at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory at #9, and probably also the Dawning 4000A at the Shanghai Supercomputer Center as #10, though I'm not 100% sure about this last one.
It's like deja vu all over again.
Is there a list of most powerful clusters? If so, does /. make that list?
Evolution or ID?
"The Thunder system, based on 4,096 Intel Corp. Itanium 2 processors, at LLNL recorded a maximum performance of 20T flops"
I hope they're not using Linux. That's a LOT of SCO licenses...
The ways of gods are mysteriously indistinguishable from chance.
I see my machine has not made it into the list. Ah well. Maybe next year...
Pitty they don't have one of the top500 running the website. It seems to be going rather slowly at the moment...
SJW n. One who posts facts.
It's worth pointint out that if you're going to consider a given supercomputer to be "AMD" or "Intel" based on where the processors come from, then Virginia Tech's cluster of Apple Xserves is an "IBM" machine.
That's not to take anything away from Apple. Both Xserve and the G5 towers that came before them are a great design, reliable, run a great OS, yada yada yada. But the chips are IBM.
In October, HP was impressive, because they filled the bottom of the list with Itanium based superdome: they ranked those all on the same bench figures, that means that those computers were not benchmarked by the customers but by HP. That was a good oportunity for IBM: each time they could put one of their computers on the list, they were sure to throw an HP one out of it, so increase the gap by a factor of 2 (+1 for IBM, -1 for HP) with their main rival.
So I am now wondering if this top500 list still means anything in term of performances and computing power, or is just a promoting tool, where manufacturers can conduct a war on market shares.
Supercomputers are big calculators. If there is a GUI, you run it on your own computers.
And, before you ask, supercomputers generally won't make your games run faster. The game would have to be completely rewritten to take advantage of the architecture -- and, even if there is graphics hardware installed, most HPC architectures aren't designed to deliver a high framerate.
This makes me wonder why Google is not on this list.
This is my sig. There are thousands more, but this one is mine.
In other news, Bush administration officials have created 1.2 million new jobs by hiring unemployed Americans to close pop-ups windows for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, whose new supercomputer will be used to study nuclear bombs, the weather, and the dynamics of carpal tunnel syndrome.
Number 1 beat you to it (albeit slightly varied). Not seen number 2 yet.
I'm still waiting for IN SOVIET RUSSIA BEOWULF CLUSTERS IMAGINE YOU, but I won't stoop to posting that.
I'm in need of some informed opinions for an impending purchase. This thread might be just the ticket.
Given a choice of a p690 (32 processors) and offerings of either 32 or 64 processors from SGI (altix) and HP, which would you choose everything else being roughly equivalent?
Use the Mirror
Before everyone starts congratulating AMD's success and talking about the superiority of the Opteron and Intel's imminent demise etc etc, I thought it might be worth mentioning that AMD isn't the only company improving on the list:
A look at the hardware shows Intel Corp. making big gains on its competitors with a total of 287 machines are based on Intel chips, up from 119 this time last year.
...and which run linux? I'd be interested in seeing some benchmarking and stability comparisons.
Can anyone provide a link to this info please?
No, they are under construction, that means the big Mac will provide a large frech fry for free when it comes back.
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
1) The VT cluster will probably never beat the EarthSim. Why? Because the interconnects (fancy network connections) are so specialized on EarthSim that it will tromp any off the shelf system. Furthermore everything about the EarthSim computers are built to be clustered as they are. VT uses infiniband which is faster and lower latency than Myranet or the other common cluster interconnects, which is part of the reason why it kicks so much butt, but the systems are still pretty much off the shelf and will never be able to beat EarthSim. Of course VT does for millions upon millions less and much more cost effectively, so even if it's not #1, in many ways it is the best.
2) Google's cluster is (probably) a much more distributed system, it would probably take a severe beating in trying to do the LinPack benchmarks that they use to rank the top500. The algorithm requires a lot of data passing, it probably doesn't excel at low latency or even high bandwidth (>16Gb/s) data passing. That's just an educated guess though, AFAIK that information is pretty well secreted. In raw processing power under one roof Google probably has it made, but since most problems (not all, read: *@home) in science and math require lots of data passing between nodes Google will probably get trounced in the top500.
Patrik
----------
Just your ordinary BOFH
http://killertux.org
:-\
In other news, Car & Driver released their list of top ten coolest cars. The new Ford GT was not included because Bob had it in the garage for an oil change.
--- Ban humanity.
And the top one is #10. Russia took 2 positions. Japan took 30+ positions. Germany took 30+ positions. United Kingdom took 30+ positions. France took 10+ positions. Well, Skynet still have a longway to go to take control of Russia.
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
Perhaps they .. didn't submit to the Top500 list.
that tells more about "the beast". So far, I just can tell that it is made of linux clusters, containing about 12500 nodes, because in case of clusters you are facing bi processors systems 98% of the time.
Here is the track, if someone wants to hunt the beast.
If you can read this sig - the bitch fell off.
oh I thought "under construction" was an ex-RDF expression for "didn't perform as expected under scrutiny"
i wonder how many TFlops they'll make when they're back.
From an IBM press release (emphasis mine):
:-)
"The 100 teraflop ASCI Purple system will be powered by 12,544 POWER5 microprocessors, IBM's next generation microprocessor. These processors will be contained in 196 individual computers with a total memory bandwidth of 156,000 GBs, the equivalent of 31,200 DVD movies every second. All of the computers are interconnected via a super-fast data highway with a total interconnect bandwidth of 12,500 GB. ASCI Purple will run IBM's AIX 5L operating system.
The system will also contain 50 terabytes of memory (50 trillion units), which is 400,000 times more capacity than the average desktop PC and two petabytes of disk storage (two quadrillion units), the content of approximately one billion books."
While impressive, I couldn't help laughing at the new bandwidth unit. Wonder why they didn't use LOC in the paragraph on memory and storage, would have made it perfect...
Nothing wrong with these, of course
I am also surprised not to see my work on the list. But i was told for a few reasons why we are not on there.We didnt get all of our machines in on time for us to post and didnt want to make our larger facility look bad. Also i see the results only include just one machine and not the total computing power of all the machines as one cluster. I can tell you for a fact in the last top500 results we were in the 300 area but only tested just one of our nodes (SGI Origin 3000 512 cpus) and not the cluster. Its a shame you cant see what the power of some of theses clusters have. We have 2 SGI Origin 3000 512 cpu machines, 5 SGI Origin 3000 256 cpu machines, 2 SGI Origin 3000 96 cpu machines, 1 SGI Origin 3000 128 cpu machine, 2 SGI Altix 256 cpu machines, and 1 SGI Altix 96 cpu machine. Add that all together and you have a lot of power. Sorry if i seemed to be bragging, but it would be good to have better tests to show what some places really have more power over others.
Check out the June 1994 list. Ten years ago, supercomputers at about the 100th place on the list had gigaflop performance of today's desktops. Flashmob1, the University of San Francisco event in April that assembled a 180 gigaflop cluster in a single day, would have been at the number 1 spot. It's just cool to imagine the trend continuing, and it could, especially with wifi or wimax collective computing.
These are the top 500 that we know about. What do you bet the NSA (and whatever the Chinese and possibly the Russian equivalents are) has at least 1 that is faster than all of these?
That's gotta fit into your schema somewhere
In Soviet Russia Bewulf clusters imagine YOU.
The odd thing is that in the AMD press release they note 30 AMD chips, but the top 500 site itself says 34 AMD processors. I wonder what the story is on the other 4.
Paul Sundling
why wasn't my cluster of 386's on the top 500 list?? jesus.. these people don't know what they are talking about..
just kidding.. the earth simulator is a beast..
- Hi I'm Linus Torvalds and I pronounce Linux, Lih-nix..
This is exactly right. Mad props to you.
Sure it'd have to be rewritten, but imagine playing an FPS with full ray tracing and movie quality textures.
"That's so plausible, I can't believe it!" - Leela
When did we become a pr flack's playground?
IBM has ~45% of the machines and Intel ~57% of the processors. Intel's delta's was more then AMD's total.
Time to buy a G5 and get away from these twits.
So if you look at rank 81 through 92, there's a lot of machines using Xeon 2.8s with gig-e. Rank 81 has 1030 processors, rank 92 has 650.
Yeah, that's a difference of 380 processors, fairly close to 30%....... and Rmax is 2026 for all of them.
Sure, this is one benchmark only, but damn, that must look bad when your extra 380 procs doesn't get any improvement.
That's not entirely true. There are visualization supercomputers dedicated to displaying the immense data that results from detailed physical system simulations.
Yea i would aggreee that those extra cpus arnt getting any acction. Shame my works 3232 cpus cant show off its potential with the kind of testing they have up. We need for better tests!!