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New Top500 List Released at Supercomputing '06
Guybrush_T writes "Today the 27th Edition of the Top 500 List of World's Fastest Supercomputers was released at ISC 2006. IBM BlueGene/L remains the world fastest computer with 280.6 TFlop/s. No new US system in the top10 this year, since they all come from Europe and Japan. The French Cluster at CEA (French NNSA equivalent) is number 5 with 42.9 TFlop/s. The Earth simulator (no 10) is no longer the largest system in Japan since the GSIC Center built a 38.2 TFlop/s Cluster, reaching the 7th place. The German cluster at Juelich is number 8 with 37.3 TFlop/s. The full list, and the previous 26 lists, are available on the Top500.org site."
To keep up with the rate that humans make mistakes.
I believe it's:
FLoating point OPerations / second, with the / representing "per"
The editors comment that there are no new 10 top US based computers is an odd comment. The US has 6 out of the top 10. Thats hardly doing poorly.
I see water cooling rigs all time take 2ghz CPUs to +4ghz. Why not use this for these machines? Perhaps a motherboard that could be bathed in cooling fluid...
Even comparing simpler things, like shoes or knives, can not be reduced to a single measurement. Microwave ovens and air-conditioners are already far more complex and come with huge vectors of parameters to compare.
Can a meaningful comparision be made of computer systems based on just one number? N TFlop/s vs. M TFlop/s? I don't think so...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
That's not a supercomputer, that's a really large computing grid. Supercomputers are needed for tasks that require insane amounts of RAM and a really fast system bus. When you have many computers, the data transfer speed between computers is limited by the network bandwidth, and any network is slow compared to your CPU-memory bus. That may be OK for tasks like searching but not acceptable for physics simulation/capture. Sensors connected to a modern collider generate tens of gigabytes of data per second. So to simulate it you'll need to transfer all that data through your network, which will require hours or even days to simulate just one second.
A common story occurance on slashdot for the submitter to highlight some deep deficiency in American business, technology, or way of life, which is then inevitably followed by non-American dick-swinging nationalism of why someone else does it better. This is a perfect example.
an ill wind that blows no good
Google's full computing power is no more a supercomputer than distributed.net or seti@home is. Yes, both supercomputers and seti@home are parallel computation, but they are very different beasts.
Does google have a supercomputer? Maybe. I'm not actually clear what use a "traditional" supercomputer would be to them. For one thing, "disk" IO is genrally not the forte of a supercomputer, at least compared to processing power.
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I believe the numbers next to the OS names were referring to the number of supercomputers using that OS. Easy mistake.