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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."

3 of 152 comments (clear)

  1. Wait another year... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting
    That's like, what, 527 Cell processors?

    Obviously that number's based on an unrealistic, 100% efficient scaling factor. But still. The 137 TFlop is coming from 64,000 processors.

    It's fun to think about what's just around the corner.

  2. Re:Cell vs HPC by shizzle · · Score: 3, Interesting
    2) DP Matrix-Matrix multiplies. IBM added DP support to their VMX set for Cell (though at 10% the execution rate), check.
    [...]
    ...clearly Cell is meant as a supercomputer first and a PS3 second.
    I think you've refuted your own argument there: double precision floating point performance is critical for true supercomputing. (In supercomputing circles DP and SP are often referred to as "full precision" and "half precision", respectively, which should give you a better idea of how they view things.)

    In contrast, SP is plenty of accuracy for things like rendering and game physics, since (very loosely speaking) as long as you're within a fraction of a pixel of the right answer you don't need any more accuracy.

    I'd say the Cell architecture is very well suited for supercomputing as well as gaming, but the announced Cell implementation appears to me to be clearly targeted at the PS3. They'll have to come out with a "Cell HPC Edition" that has much better DP performance before they take over supercomputing. Not that I don't expect that they're working on that as we speak...

  3. Scalar performance -- Unimpressed! by tarpitcod · · Score: 3, Interesting

    What's the scalar performance of one of these beasties?

    Can an Athlon 64 / P4 beat it on scalar code? The whole HPC world has gotten boring since Cray died. Here's why I say that:

    The Cray 1 had the best SCALAR and VECTOR performance in the world.

    The Cray 2 was an ass kicker, the Cray 3 was a real ass kicker (if only they could build them reliably).

    Cray pushed the boundaries, he pushed them too far at some points -- designing and trying to build machines that they couldn't make reliable.

    So it'll be a cold day in hell before I get all fired up over the fact that someone else managed to glue together a bazillion 'killer micros' and win at Linpack...
    Now if someone would bring back the idea of transputers, or we saw some *real* efforts at Dataflow and FP then I'd be excited. I'd love a PC with 8 small, simple, fast, in-order tightly bound cpus. Don't say CELL, all indications are that they will be a *real* PITA to program to get any decent performance out of.