Earth Simulator, G5 Cluster Drop In 'Top 500' List

daveschroeder writes "The November Top 500 supercomputer list has been published at SC2004. Topping the charts is IBM and the US Department of Energy's 'BlueGene/L DD2' beta system, at 70.72 TFlops, followed by NASA's 'Columbia' at 51.87.TFlops. For the first time in several publications of this list, Japan's Earth Simulator is no longer in the number one slot, falling to third. Virginia Tech's 'System X' Xserve G5 cluster, while 20% faster than the original cluster that debuted at number 3 last November, has fallen to number 7 due to the new entries, but remains the fastest supercomputer at an academic institution. Here's an excellent cost comparison (Google cache) of the top machines ('System X' is significantly cheaper than anything else in the top 20, not to mention cheaper than many things far below it in performance)."

Comments

Re:Not to mention that BG beats BigMac in flops/$

[Anonymous Coward]

Recently IBM announced their commercial prices for BG machines (see e.g. theregister.co.uk or news.com.com). Prices start at $1.5 million (1 fully equipped cabinet). Using this price and published linpack figures one arrives at about 2.9 Mflop/s/$, compared to the maximum value of 2.2 Mflop/s/$ he quotes for the best apple system.

Actually, that 2.2MFLOP/s/$ figure for VT's cluster isn't the best for an apple XServe based system. The University of Maine built a 512 CPU cluster of XServes for $680K, or 3.012MFLOP/s/$, according to the price comparison's chart, edging out a BlueGene cabinet.

Of course, now I get to be flamed by a bunch of mac haters who think pointing out a factual error in your statement means I don't know anything else about clustering and will blindly chose a mac above all others.... *sigh*