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BlueGene/L Puts the Hammer Down

Posted by Hemos on from the welcome-to-the-machine dept.

OnePragmatist writes "Cyberinfrastructure Technology Watch is reporting that BlueGene/L has nearly doubled its performance to 135.3 Teraflops by doubling its processors. That seems likely to keep it at no. 1 on the Top500 when the next round comes out in June. But it will be interesting to see how it does when they finally get around to testing it against the HPC Challenge benchmark, which has gained adherents as being more indicative of how a HPC system will peform with various different types of applicatoins."

2 of 152 comments (clear)

  1. Math Error? by mothlos · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Roughly as expected, BlueGene/L can now crank away at 135.3 trillion floating point operations per second (teraflops), up from the 70.72 teraflops it was doing at the end of 2004. BlueGene/L now has half of its planned processors and is more than half way to achieving its design goal of 360 teraflops.



    Is it just me or is 135.3 * 2 < 360 / 2?

  2. Cell vs HPC by adam31 · · Score: 5, Insightful
    The HPC Challenge benchmark is especially interesting and I think sheds some light on the design goals IBM had in coming up with the Cell.

    1) Solving linear equations. SIMD Matrix math, check.
    2) DP Matrix-Matrix multiplies. IBM added DP support to their VMX set for Cell (though at 10% the execution rate), check.
    3) Processor/Memory bandwidth. XDR interface at 25.6 GB/s, check.
    4) Processor/Processor bandwidth. FlexIO interface at 76.8 GB/s, check.
    5) "measures rate of integer random updates of memory", hmmmm... not sure.
    6) Complex, DP FFT. Again, DP support at a price. check.
    7) Communication latency & bandwidth. 100 GB/s total memory bandwidth, check (though this could be heavily influenced on how IBM handles its SPE threading interface)

    Obviously, I'm not saying they used the HPC Challenge as a design document, but clearly Cell is meant as a supercomputer first and a PS3 second.