"Intrepid" Supercomputer Fastest In the World

Stony Stevenson writes "The US Department of Energy's (DoE) high performance computing system is now the fastest supercomputer in the world for open science, according to the Top 500 list of the world's fastest computers. The list was announced this week during the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, Germany. IBM's Blue Gene/P, known as 'Intrepid,' is located at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility and is also ranked third fastest overall. The supercomputer has a peak performance of 557 teraflops and achieved a speed of 450.3 teraflops on the Linpack application used to measure speed for the Top 500 rankings. According to the list, 74.8 percent of the world's supercomputers (some 374 systems) use Intel processors, a rise of 4 percent in six months. This represents the biggest slice of the supercomputer cake for the firm ever."

Comments

Top500 list, speculation, and private companies

[painehope]

Firstly, the Top 500 list is the "authoritative" list, released each year at the Supercomputing Convention. Until then, nothing is really official. Though the list has it's own flaws, mostly from vendors submitting flawed benchmarks and/or guesswork.

Secondly, the real benchmark is the application. Some algorithms run better on some platforms and worse on others. Period. Unless you are running a highly specialized set of applications - and nothing but - the rule of thumb is "design the best system you can, that has the best overall performance for the majority of codes, and if it excels in one area, great". Of course, most supercomputing is FP intensive, so anything that has an excellent FPU architecture will probably be your best bet. And don't forget bottlenecks, like storage, network, memory, etc.

And, last but not least, remember that there are a lot of private companies with incredibly large systems. And most of those companies do not advertise their processing capabilities. Universities and government labs do, private industry generally doesn't. Of course, private industry is often trapped by the portability of their applications to new architectures, thus rendering the use of a system like Blue Gene/P useless to them.

Re:Booooring

[Anonymous Coward]

So how come Roadrunner has half the number of processors of Intrepid, but is twice as fast?

In supercomputing it's all about bandwidth. It always was and always will be. That's also why Google isn't on the list - a bunch of off the shelf hardware sucks at bandwidth.

real measure

[flaming-opus]

Well, the real measure of fastest computer has a lot to do with what software you want to run on it. In the example of the top500 list, linpack scales almost perfectly as you add processor cores, and makes very limited demands of network speed, memory bandwidth, or single-processor performance. Other codes really can't scale past 16 processors, so these massive processor jumbles don't amount to a hill of beans.

Most codes are somewhere between. As the machine gets larger, the more effort has to be put in designing the software to actually use all the hardware.