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."

Comments

These links work:

[BReflection]

main page: http://freecache.org/http://www.top500.org/

click view lists: http://freecache.org/http://www.top500.org/lists/2 004/06/

the list: http://freecache.org/http://www.top500.org/list/20 04/06/

Re:How do they measure?

[henrik]

Using LINPACK of course.

Linux clusters still rule

[Sunspire]

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.

Re:Linux clusters still rule

[Anonymous Coward]

just about 1 out of 64 chips runs a full powerpc version of linux (lightly modified), that will be the node that handles input/output for that group of nodes. the others run a small custom and very stripped down kernel, i don't remember the name, i attended a presentation at my university here in italy.
on a side note the cluster that will control bluegene (yes, to control the big beast they are planning to use a cluster of machines, for example they will use db2 to store informations about the 64 thousands nodes. think about it, a cluster to control a HUGE cluster...) will be made of linux workstations.
pretty impressive...

mirror site

[Anonymous Coward]

Use the Mirror

Re:IBM's Blue Gene

[flaming-opus]

Did they mention why myrinet and infiniband are heat sensitive? I've used myrinet before, and did not encounter any problems with it, though I was not using 1U dual-CPU systems. (just a bad idea in general) A myrinet card includes a pretty high-clocked ASIC that runs warm for a network card, but is nothing compared to most graphics cards these days.

Blue Gene is an amazingly simple, and crafty design, with efficiency at its heart. I'm not sure that it will be as successful as the IBM marketing machine claims it will, but it's exciting none-the-less.

The trend in CPUs, over the last ten years or so, has been to maximally fill long, wide super-scalar pipelines. The Power4 has half a dozen execution units and a 15 stage pipeline, running at 1.7 ghz. To keep that full, one has to have exceptional branch prediction, huge caches, and superb compilers, and tons of memory bandwidth.

The Blue Gene approach is to have fewer, shallower, lower-clocked pipelines, but lots of CPUs. Their peak speed is a quarter of the top CPU designs, but their real speed is half of the big guns. Since they are using today's chip technology to implement yesterday's chip designs, they use little power, and are very inexpensive. Since IBM has cleverly integrated all the communications networks and memory controllers, you only need three components in the system: CPUs, RAM chips, and passive circuit boards - plastic and copper. (Yeah, I'm sure there is other stuff, but not much)

The design is not revolutionary, it's a fairly intuitive evolution of the Paragon, or the T3E. This sort of system may not be perfect for every task, but will excell at the sorts of tasks that already work well on big clusters. That, and it will likely be very cost effective.

Re:Apple Xserve cluster is IBM too

[Anonymous Coward]

The PowerPC G5 is the product of a long-standing partnership between Apple and IBM, two companies committed to innovation and customer-driven solutions. In 1991, they co-created a PowerPC architecture that could support both 32-bit and 64-bit instructions. Leveraging this design, Apple went on to bring 32-bit RISC processing to desktop and portable computers, while IBM focused on developing 64-bit processors for enterprise servers.The new PowerPC G5 represents a convergence of these efforts: Its design is based on the PowerPC instruction set, as well as the POWER Architecture that drives IBM's top-of-the-line enterprise servers. The PowerPC G5 is fabricated in IBM's new $3 billion, state-of-the-art facility in East Fishkill, New York.To get electronics so small requires miniaturization breakthroughs, and IBM's dedication to scientific research has made these advances possible.With industry-leading build, assembly, and test technology, IBM uses a 90-nanometer process to produce the PowerPC G5. More than 58 million silicon-on-insulator (SOI) transistors and eight layers of copper interconnects enable this new processor to deliver tremendous performance.

Re:WWDC Power

[deadline]

Better read this first there cowboy. It is not as easy as you think.