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Latest Top 500 Supercomputer List Released
chrb writes "BBC News is reporting on the release of the June 2010 Top 500 Supercomputer list. Notable changes include a second Chinese supercomputer in the top ten. A graphical display enables viewing of the supercomputer list by speed, operating system, application, country, processor, and manufacturer."
Ya for Linux!
Seriously, if this doesn't make every PHB take notice I can't imagine what would. (Hey boss, its free too!)
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
How about a direct link to the actual site - or even the actual list?
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
It's especially interesting for two reasons. Firstly, because at that sort of scale interconnect throughput and latency can make a much bigger difference than processor speed. With HyperTransport, AMD has had a huge advantage over Intel here (IBM also uses HyperTransport). It looks like QPI might have eliminated that advantage. Beyond that, you have the supporting circuitry - you don't just plug a few thousand processors into a board and have them work, you need a lot of stuff to make them talk to each other without massive overhead.
The other interesting thing is that the Chinese are using Intel processors at all. I would have expected them to use Loongson 2F chips, or Loongson 3 if they were out in time. I'm not sure if Loongson wasn't up to the job, or if they had some other reason for using a foreign-designed chip.
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"A good fraction" in this case means: Less than 10%. In fact, only 42 out of 500 use POWER.
Wikipedia shows the highest performing Loongson system before April scored 1 teraflop peak, and "and about 350 GFLOPS measured by linpack in Hefei". Sounds like they are focusing on performance/watt more than being the fastest, from a read of the rest of the article. Still pretty fast stuff, considering their newest system has 80 quads and is claimed to have a peak around 1 teraflop.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
What's even more interesting is that the nVidia chips that made Nebulae so fast seem to have escaped your notice.
pleaides isnt nukes, its nasa. airplanes and weather.
the others some are nukes some are open unclassified uses.
noaa/nsf/etc
If I could walk that way I wouldnt need cologne.
Because it's delicious, seriously! Don't knock it till you've tried it. It's not conceptually much different from a big sausage, anyway.
Parallel tasks are the whole point of using a supercomputer.
Well it is now. The original supercomputers were based around a single very fast processor, and had a number of co-processors whose sole purpose was to offload IO and memory prefetch, so the CPU could churn away without interruption. Modern out-of-order CPUs are effectively an old style supercomputer on a chip. Heavy use of parallel processing didn't really take off until the late 80s. This paradigm shift is what caused the supercomputer market crash in the 90s, as development devolved from custom CPUs, to throwing as many generic cores at the problem as you can and using custom interconnects to mitigate parallel overhead.
um. you want a Beowulf with that?
Linux has been in the supercomputer lists for decades.
Google is a much better example of how you can use Linux to take over the world; which is what every self respecting middle manager want's to do.
I.e. Shit loads of cheap compute power. Got any tasks which need that?
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"Linux family" operating systems went from 89% in the previous list to 91% of this one.
Not that the field wasn't already dominated, but it's an interesting milestone. (FWIW, Linux passed 75% in 2006-11, 50% in 2004-06, and 25% in 2003-06.)