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25th TOP500 List Released
Chris Vaughan writes "The 25th edition of the TOP500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers was released today (June 22, 2005) at the 20th International Supercomputing Conference (ISC2005) in Heidelberg Germany. The No. 1 position was again claimed by the previously mentioned BlueGene/L System. At present, IBM and Hewlett-Packard sell the bulk of systems at all performance levels of the TOP500. The U.S is clearly the leading consumer of HPC systems with 294 of the 500 systems installed there (up from 267 six months ago)."
The list can be found here:6
http://www.top500.org/lists/plists.php?Y=2005&M=0
And here's a link to the actual list. Also interesting is the historical chart of the TOP500 by manufacturer, which tells a story in itself -- the decline of Cray and rise of IBM and Hitachi, for one.
You'd think that it would be a good idea to actually link to the html list, or the xml list, or the pretty charts.
The press release is interesting too.
Karma: SELECT `karma` FROM `users` WHERE `userid`=138474;
It would be great if we could verify Moore's law through some simple stats using the histrical data from this Top500 list.
-For example:How many years did it take for Number ones on average to be dropped off the 500 list?
- How many years after the list was published did it take personal computers tu make it in the 500list? To make it to the number 1 spot?
- How many transistors did these computers have? Did it verify Moore's law?
- Are we getting more TFLOPS per watt now? Per transistor?
etc..
Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity
Why is my beowulf of Mac Mini's not in the list?
How can this be? I thought it was running at 2+ Terraflops. Didn't anyone watch E3?
Top 10 Reasons To Procrastinate
10.
And at position #501, OSX running on an Intel processor. Hey, Steve promised it would be fast.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
What's surprising to me is that Cray used to be synonymous with supercomputers and they now have comparatively few entries.
Until now.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Earth Simulator ( #3 on the list ) : 51870
The #1 linpack score is well over twice the #3 linpack score ?!?
That fact combined with the large number of IBM-based systems on the to 100 list really makes it look like IBM is dominating this sector of the market.
You know what data is always missing from this list that we'd all like to see ? The cost of the systems. Although, I suppose if you're looking at building the most powerful computer system on the planet, cost might not be your first consideration...
Well I figured since Apple managed a #14 slot M$ could at least "show up" ;-)
Here's a list of things I would do if I had access to one of the systems on that list:
/had an original IBM PC // bored
- See how long it takes Windows ME to boot
- See how long it takes pico to open
- run 'top'
- play a wicked ass game of pong
- bitch about having so many CPU's and only 2 USB ports
- see if I could get a video card with dual display support
- fire up a spreadsheet and make a wicked ass multiplication table going really far (like 10X10!)
MareNostrum wins hands down for best looking computer room/
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
For you rabid fanbois (like me) here is how AMD scored:
/Processors Manufacturer Rmax Rpeak
Rank Site Country/Year Computer
10 Sandia National Laboratories
11 Oak Ridge National Laboratory
31 Shanghai Supercomputer Center
32 Los Alamos National Laboratory
33 Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center
39 US Army Research Laboratory (ARL)
46 Grid Technology Research Center, AIST
57 Swiss Scientific Computing Center (CSCS)
75 DOE/Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory
76 DOE/Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory
109 The University of Nottingham
144 Automotive Manufacturer (F)
155 Los Alamos National Laboratory
156 Government
167 Universitaet Wuppertal
174 United Institute of Informatics Problems
244 DaimlerChrysler
300 Veritas DGC
306 Ford Motor Company
347 Idaho National Engineering Laboratory
348 Japan Adv. Inst. of Science and Technology (JAIST)
388 Umea University / HPC2N
490 Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing
499 Doshisha University
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
It all depends on the system architecture and the type of problem being solved. Certain problems will adhere better to certain architectures and thus allow for a smaller gap between the theoretical and actual performance. The gaps can also be inherent in the architecture itself (e.g. communications bandwidth like you said).
Personally, I don't think that Human brains are binary based, logic gate controlled computation machines, and this difference accounts for why we have so much diffuclty with developing strong AI on them.
I do believe, however, that we will eventually "crack the code" to the fundamental archetecture of our brains, and once we do that, we will re-design our computers accordingly, and finally achieve strong AI.
I also believe, that our currently architected computers will play a key role in assisting us with cracking this code.
... still installing service packs and patches.
These ranking are based on LINPACK doing traditional operations like solving linear equations, so supercomputers like the Cray MTA aren't even listed even though for some grand challenges they destroy everything else, for example when doing dynamic mesh weather simluations. Each processor on the memory grid has 128 processor threads where the active thread switches every cycle (so memory fetch has huge latency). This lets it have a unified memory model and still have extremely high throughput.
So the MTA can adjust the mesh to compute the tornado in very fine detail while using far fewer points for the huge swaths of calmer weather around it. Traditional supercomputers can't do that well since just distributing the data points to each processor is so much overhead.
Well, M$ doesn't make hardware.
Actually, come to think of it they do. Where's the Beowulf cluster of XBoxes?
-- Alastair
That's probably because brains use a completely different architecture than digital computers. Neurons connect in a highly parallel fashion, with trillions simultaneous of connections arranged in 3D directly between various parts of the brain. Even with the 1000000X speed advantage of computer logic, the number of permutations of neuron connections compared with the serial nature of computer buses allows the brain to outpower computers on many real-world problems.
Because they are full of narrow bottelneck data paths, computers rely heavily on locality of reference and precomputed indices to do anything efficiently. A brain, with a storage architecture approaching fully associative memory, can instantly compare any input against a lifetime of experiences with no need for predefined indices. It is somehow able to use high-level concepts as access keys as well, in contrast to the binary numbers that computers must use to address storage.
The result of all of this is that for many tasks like navigation in the real world, a cockroach brain compares favorably to the most powerful current digital computers.
The U.S is clearly the leading consumer of HPC systems with 294 of the 500 systems installed there
And we'd bomb anyone who tried to pass us back into the stone age, since the only reason to have a computer this powerful is obviously for nuclear simulations.
Of course, we prefer to simply stay in the lead, but when all else fails trip the other racer.
Now, where is that incendiary protection suit - I get the impression I'll need it soon...
-Adam
BlueGene/L - eServer Blue Gene Solution Livermore, United States Processors: 65536
It would astronomically increase the cost of the cluster. Windows 2003 Enterprise edition only handles up to 8 processors (and 32 gigs of ram), so any more than that, and you'll have to buy the OS over and over again (my assumption) - 8192 times that is... ( 65536 total processors / 8 processors per Windows install )
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/evaluat ion/overview/enterprise.mspx
Microsoft 2003 Enterprise Server (up to 25 clients) $1,899.00 - Quick Froogle search...
8192 * $1,899.00 = $15,556,608.00
Imagine how much more you could add to your cluster for that kind of cash...
If I'm off-base or wrong in my assumptions, please correct me as this even suprised me after doing the quick research!
Content Management System: A pretentious way of saying "text editor."
God, this makes me miss *lisp and my CM-2. With supercomputing being taken over by Big Blue and the like, there seems little room anymore for the smaller, more flexible players like Thinking Machines.