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

Why the fuss about Earth Simulator?

[Moblaster]

IBM's new supercomputer will calculate "42" before the Japanese. America can feel good again.

Evidently....

[dkone]

they are not running their site on one of the top 500.

Oh dear

[Killjoy_NL]

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.

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.

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.

What I find interesting...

[Noryungi]

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.

Re:What I find interesting...

[flaming-opus]

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.

How do they measure?

[-noefordeg-]

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.

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/

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.

My machine

[swapsn]

I see my machine has not made it into the list. Ah well. Maybe next year...

Apple Xserve cluster is IBM too

[YouHaveSnail]

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.

+ 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).

Re:"heavily anticipated"?

[TimeZone]

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

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

Sheesh

[HarveyBirdman]

the famous Apple cluster didn't make the list, because it was out of service for hardware upgrades

:-\

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.