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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.
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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.
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.
I see my machine has not made it into the list. Ah well. Maybe next year...
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.
Do it!
Assuming an average 1GHz per person, 4 FLOPS per cycle (assuming you could get Altivec working flat strap), 70,000 people turn up that could work out to be... ummm.... 280 teraflops.
You'd have yourself a Universe Simulator with that amount of power!
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.
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
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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.
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.
Better read this first there cowboy. It is not as easy as you think.
HPC for Primates. Read Cluster Monkey
A supercomputer would be really rather unsuitable for this kind of thing. The most important thing by far is having a really fat pipe, as opposed to a really fast computer. Besides, loosely coupled clusters with load balancing would do a much better job (for the cost) than a super computer since the (expensive) tight coupling a that super computer gives is unnecessary.
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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