Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Top 500 Supercomputer List Released

Posted by Hemos on from the ibm-moves-ahead dept.

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."

3 of 167 comments (clear)

  1. What I find interesting... by Noryungi · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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)
    1. Re:What I find interesting... by flaming-opus · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I did some contract work at ILM several years ago, and know why this is. They don't use one big machine, but rather a bunch of medium sized clusters. This is for a very good reason. Weta has, thus far, worked on one big movie at a time, where all of their resources are dedicated to a single data set. ILM is constantly working on half a dozen moveis all at once.

      In essence, they lease some amount of resources to a particular movie studio for some number of months. At the time they were doing this with row upon row of 32 processor SGIs, but they are probably using something else these days. Thus no spot on the top500 list. However, since they are in the business of making movies, I bet they don't really care.

  2. Re:"heavily anticipated"? by TimeZone · · Score: 5, Insightful
    You probably don't understand that a lot of people are employed in the area. I worked on technology that went into the #6 machine, and yeah, the top500 lists mean a lot to us. I've been waiting a long time for something I worked on to end up in the top 10.

    TZ