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Windows Breaks Into Supercomputer Top 10
yanx0016 writes "Wow, that's some news this week at SuperComputing 08. Apparently Microsoft Windows HPC Server 2008, with a Chinese hardware OEM (Dawning), made #10 on the Top500 list, edging out #11 by only 600 Gflops. Folks were shocked to see Microsoft getting so serious around HPC; I think we are only beginning to see a glimpse of Microsoft in the HPC field."
Honestly, why would anyone want to roll-out something like this on Windows. A lot of extra expense for little practical value.
Occam's razor is the blind faith in the natural selection of least resistance and in universal oversimplification. -- EF
Arming the "Golden Shield" project with comprehensive IT technology
With the rapid development of the Internet, the public security information construction has become an important component of national information construction. Dawning made contributions in improving information technology level within all of the public security departments, arming the "Golden Shield" project with information technology, equipping the "police" force with digitalization, intensifying the police by technology and comprehensively raising China public security's law enforcement and administrative capacity.
I like how they quote "police" force.
Shortly after coming online, they noticed that it broke a speed record downloading "instructions" from abilena.podolsk-mo.ru
edging out #11 by only 600 Gflops
Emphasis mine.
Maybe I'm suffering from a case of advancing years, but I couldn't help but be amazed by this metric. These days it is indeed small, but another part of me remembers being a fifteen year old kid amazed at how absolutely great his C64 was.
I wonder exactly how many years a C64 would have to run to make up a single seconds worth of that difference. How long would a C64 have to run to perform 600 Gflop? How long would every single C64 ever made have to run? I wonder.
You'd have to run some integer-only 6502 IEEE floating point library or something like that to figure out how long a single floating point operation would take on the C64. Then multiply by 600G.
Would it be a few years? A few millenia? Blue-green algae?
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
"With the release of HPC Server 2008 a few weeks ago, Microsoft also offered an academic version priced at $15 per node to generate interest. By comparison, a commercial license runs $450 per node"
For once, a computer that deserves the "Vista capable" sticker.
Can you imagine a botnet of those?
I can.
I am a name troll of Westlake. Visit my homepage to learn why.
FLOPS and MIPS are all very well, but if the OS is pissing them away then it does not matter much.
(Interviewing MS HPC Program Manager)
"Well, yeah it does stuff! Just look. You've got it all right here...Word, Excel, even Access. And just wait until you see how fast the cards fly when you win Solitaire!"
A couple of years ago I was surprised when one of my HPC customers issued a press release saying that their machine ran Windows HPC. The high-speed interconnect we'd sold them had no Windows drivers. You can guess what was going on: MicroSoft paid for the press release, and the machine actually ran Linux.
Dawning's previous fast machine ran Linux.
What's missing in the article is that there are only a few windows-based systems in the top500 and there numbers have been declining over the years.
New things are always on the horizon
It is one thing to measure Drystones etc, or some other simple grunt-measuring metric, but that does not realistically stress the OS's influence on how the system will perform on huge complex number crunching models.
Microsoft has only been in this game for a short time and only recently got support for 256 cores. Getting support is one thing, getting **good**, optimised, support is quite another and that will take some time to get right.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
What is wrong with " M$ "?
Nothing is wrong with "M$", in the same sense that nothing is wrong with someone referring to Linux as "linsux" and open-source as "open-sores". The thing is, it tends to make you look somewhat immature.
If you can present a compelling coherent argument, you don't need to use lame decade old snipes about whatever subject matter you are discussing. If you use them in a compelling argument, it usually just makes the people you are out to persuade have a lesser opinion of what you wrote, and thus, you have sacrificed persuasive power.
It comes down to maturity for the most part and just simply putting forward a good argument.
#10 on the list uses a AMD x86_64 Opteron Quad Core @ 1900 MHz and has 30720 cores and pumps out 180600 GFlops.
#8 on the list uses a AMD x86_64 Opteron Quad Core @ 2100 MHz and has 30976 cores and pumps out 205000 GFlops.
#10 runs windows, #8 runs linux.
Working through this: Gflops/# of cores/Mhz per core I get:
#10 with 3.094 Gflops/Mhz and #8 with 3.151 Gflop/Mhz
This leaves the linux machine getting 57 more KFlops per Mhz than the windows box.
disclaimer: Totally useless mental farking, without knowing more about the systems other components and more about the processor generations it's silly to assume the 57 KFlops is purely due to the OS, but hey, it's windows and everyone loves an easy target. :D