TOP500 Supercomputer Sites For 2006

geaux writes to let us know about the release of the 28th TOP500 List of the world's fastest supercomputers. From the article: "The IBM BlueGene/L system, installed at DOE's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, retains the No. 1 spot with a Linpack performance of 280.6 teraflops (trillions of calculations per second, or Tflop/s). The new No. 2 systems is Sandia National Laboratories' Cray Red Storm supercomputer, only the second system ever to be recorded to exceed the 100 Tflops/s mark with 101.4 Tflops/s... Slipping to No. 3 is the IBM eServer Blue Gene Solution system, installed at IBM's Thomas Watson Research Center, with 91.20 Tflops/s Linpack performance." You need over 6.6 Tflop/s to make it into the top 100.

Comments

beowulf

[thejrwr]

just beowulf 100 PS3s together, that should be able to pull it off

Re:beowulf

[Laser Lou]

just beowulf 100 PS3s together, that should be able to pull it off

That's not how to say it. You are supposed to say "Can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of these?"

That's all good...

[DerekTomes]

...but can it run Microsoft Word? :|

Don't feel bad for Blue Gene.

[BenFenner]

The way the article reads makes me feel sad for the "IBM eServer Blue Gene Solution system, installed at IBM's Thomas Watson Research Center". It slipped to number three with a mere 91.20 Tflops/s. It's like the steam shovel in that children's book. Old and outdated, no one wants it anymore. Oh wait, it's still 1,800 times faster than my new Core Two Duo machine. Apparently I'm the one with the machine that works faster the more people watch it.

Re:Don't feel bad for Blue Gene.

[Code Master]

I'll bet that Blue Gene can also retire as a building's furnace as well.

hmmm

[ILuvRamen]

I'll have to look through that list and find one near me so I can outsource my Vista booting.

Re:Real world examples

[glwtta]

Yeah, I can't really get a clear picture unless they put it into standard units, like Libraries of Congress, or VW Beatles... I think there's also one with stacks of stuff to the Moon - that's a good one too.

Quite the reverse

[frisket]

Is there a site for the slowest computers in the world? (My office workstation, for example :-)

--
"The best cure for sea-sickness is to go and sit under a tree" -- Spike Milligan

Look out

[jbeaupre]

Sandia's supercomputer program, along with LANL's and all the weapon and nuke work done between the two is part of New Mexico's plan to take over the world ... mañana.

Big difference between #1 and #2

[max99ted]

...No. 1 spot with a Linpack performance of 280.6 teraflops... new No. 2 system... 101.4 Tflops/s

Anyone have any insight as to why the huge difference between the top two spots? It seems that the rest (3 -> down) are a lot closer in speeds...

Re:Big difference between #1 and #2

[flaming-opus]

Well #1 needs a lot of asterixes next to it. The Blue Gene architecture uses an increadible number of relatively underpowered compute nodes, each with relatively little memory, and strings them together into a cluster. It's a system architecture designed around VERY LOW COST. It works quite well for a few problems, but is difficult to use for many real world problems. Because it costs so little to build, those Department of Energy guys with the big pockets can build a VERY fast computer, at least on paper.

#2 is a more general purpose supercomputer, with a better balance of processor count, processor performance, and memory. The DOE spent a LOT of money on this machine, and thus it has a very high level of performance.

After that, you see a mix of high and low efficiency machines, but few people have the can fork over the hundreds of millions of dollars necessary for a machine that powerful. It's all about the $$$.

I'll point out, however, that the Earth Simulator is still ranked #14, 5 years after it came on-line. Of course it also cost hundreds of millions of dollars at the time.

3 out of 4 of supercomputers agree

[waif69]

Linux is the operating system to use.
FTA

Operating system Family: Linux
Count: 376
Share %: 75.20%

Password Cracker

[Bender0x7D1]

We have #141 on the list at Iowa State and we booked time on it so it could be used as a password cracker at one of our Cyber Defense Competitions.

I don't know if it actually got used, or if it was deemed "unfair" for the red team (attackers) to use it. It would have been pretty sweet if they were allowed to.

These competitions are pretty cool, and have some pretty good challenges like the red team pulling the fire alarm at 3:00AM, forcing the blue team (defenders) to evacuate the building. More info can be found at the ISU Information Assurance Student Group website, or the competition website.

Re:Wanna know something Scary...

[bathmatt]

Mississippi missed the top 100 by not-so-much. 115 Mississippi State University You may wanna check that list again, Mississippi has 4 in the top 100, (#26,35,48,58) It is only behind in NM in TFlops/capita.

To answer your question on why, Trent Lott.

BTW, ERDC (WES at Vicksberg) and NAVO (Stennis Space Ctr on the coast) are in MS

Re:Out of Date

[hlimethe3rd]

I assume that you're talking about the MDGRAPE machine that can do a petaflop. Actually, that machine is specialized for one type of calculation, thus it cannot run then LINPACK benchmark, and doesn't qualify for this list. It is not a general supercomputer. It's the same thing as claiming that a top-shelf GPU is faster than a top-shelf CPU: it's true for only a certain type of calculation.

The one they don't tell you about...

[adrenalinekick]

is the one sitting in the NSA cracking all your passwords right now.

Re:The one they don't tell you about...

[Ynsats]

Don't be so sure of yourself. There are quite a few reasons for the government and military to need all kinds of computing power. Clustered super computers can come in handy for lots of things including simulations, software testing for many systems such as guidance systems and radar systems and even things as simple as artillary trajectories. You remember those problems right? The whole reason the computer widely accepted as the FIRST computer was ever built.

Just because it doesn't seem to fit what we see as the NSA's MO doesn't mean that the NSA doesn't have use for floating-point math. The whole idea of the NSA is to make sure secrets are kept safe. To help keep those secrets safe, they don't even talk about what secrets they are keeping safe or how they are keeping them safe. There are plenty of scenarios that I can think of off the top of my head for using a floating point processor in building something like an algorithm for a statistical model to show trends apparent in data mined from internet search engines.

The realm of government secrets is an odd area to play speculation in. Just because you don't know about is the best reason to think that something like it actually exists. Will you know about something such as that? Unlikely. At least not any time soon. I wouldn't doubt that there is already technology out there so far ahead of it's time that it may never be declassified due to the dangers it could pose if it was obtained by people looking to do harm.

You need over 6.6 Tflop/s to make it into the top

[robyannetta]

You need over 6.6 Tflop/s to make it into the top 100.

...or three PS3s, but I don't forsee any one of us getting our hands on at least one of these for a few months...

Distributed Computing Wins Again...

[jemecki]

I know this isn't a fair comparison but the SETI@Home grid runs at 250 TeraFLOPS. Many of the other massive distributed computing projects run far into the Top 500 as well. reference