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

IBM's Blue Gene

[zal]

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.

+ 65 for IBM

[freeduke]

I have seen that there are 65 more IBM supercomputers in june than in october (jump from 159 to 224). I thried to figure out which computer those were, because it is an impressive gap: + 65 out of 500 in 6 month? Marketing gap?

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.

Re:Google cluster?

[pete-wilko]

Having heard a lecture from Jack Dongarra about HPC and the top 500, he mentioned that google declines to participate, as they wern't inclined to reveal their setup, or run the benchmarks for the top 500 which would mean putting their machines to other uses for the duration of the benchmark. If I rememeber though I think he said that at a guess if they did participate (based on the various 'guesstimates' out there of google's setup) that they'd easily make the top 10 if not pushing number 1. This is also leaving aside arguments over the role that the system is trying to fulfill (i.e. easily distributed work, like a search engine, vs work that can't be broken up easily like an earth simulator).

Important points of note

[patrik]

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