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Latest Top 500 Supercomputer List Released

Posted by StoneLion on from the children-of-the-cray dept.

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."

6 of 130 comments (clear)

  1. Linux by B5_geek · · Score: 5, Informative

    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)
    1. Re:Linux by morgan_greywolf · · Score: 3, Informative

      I've done systems administration on both platforms for years and I don't think that there is any real appreciable difference between the amount of knowledge and training needed on one vs. the other when comparing systems that perform similar functions. Compare Active Directory to OpenLDAP+Kerberos 5, for example. They are very, very similar in a lot of ways; so much so, in fact, that OpenLDAP+Kerberos 5 can be used to host the directory portion of a Windows domain.

      --
      My blog
  2. How about a direct link... by Jah-Wren+Ryel · · Score: 5, Informative

    How about a direct link to the actual site - or even the actual list?

    --
    When information is power, privacy is freedom.
  3. Re:By Processor by TheRaven64 · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

    --
    I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  4. Re:By Processor by Jeremy+Erwin · · Score: 3, Informative

    What's even more interesting is that the nVidia chips that made Nebulae so fast seem to have escaped your notice.

  5. Re:Computers keep getting faster by wagnerrp · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.