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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. Re:Computers keep getting faster by somersault · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I think power requirements are probably the main problem, rather than the hardware. It must be pretty trivial to add more cores to a system that's already using tens of thousands of them, but you're going to need a lot of power.

    These systems are only really getting "faster" for parallel tasks too - if you gave them a sequential workload then I assume they would fare worse than a high end gaming machine!

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    which is totally what she said
  2. By Processor by TheRaven64 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The view by processor is quite interesting. AMD has the top spot, but the majority of the top 500 have Intel chips. There are still two SPARC64 machines in the top 100, and a third one down at 383. All three SPARC64 machines are in Japan, which isn't entirely surprising. IBM makes a good showing, but it's interesting to see how far behind x86 they are, in a market that was traditionally owned by non-commodity hardware.

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    I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    1. Re:By Processor by stevel · · Score: 3, Interesting

      System and component vendors don't make money on these "lighthouse account" supercomputer sales. My experience, having worked in the past for a vendor that did this a lot, is that they're a money-loser. The motivation is bragging rights, though that can be fleeting. I know of several times that my employer declined to bid on a supercomputer deal as it would just be too expensive.

      Typically, these systems are actually sold by system vendors (Dell, HP, IBM) and not processor vendors, though the processor vendor will support the bid. That #1 "AMD" system is actually a Cray. Software also plays a large part in success or failure.

  3. Re:A 2nd "Chinese".... by TheRaven64 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Interestingly, the Chinese machines don't seem to be using Chinese CPUs yet. I was hoping to see at least one Loongson in the top 500.

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    I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  4. Food? What food? by hcpxvi · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Of the UK entries in this list, the first few are Hector (the national supercomputing facility), ECMWF, Universities, financial institutions etc. But there are also some labelled "Food industry". I wonder what I am eating that requires a supercomputer?

  5. Re:actual purpose by rdebath · · Score: 3, Interesting

    As I understand it most of the nuclear research simulations that it would be nice to run simply cannot be done on any modern machines. If it's only a few particles they can be simulated on a laptop but the interesting interactions need to simulate millions or billions of points with every single one of them influencing every other one in the simulation.

    As a simple example, a genetic algorithm was used to program some reconfigurable FPGA chips. A layout was grown on the chip the did the job but broke just about every rule for FPGA design. There were parts of the layout on the chip that were not connected to any circuit but removing them made the device fail to work. Transferring the layout to a different chip got you a non-working circuit. It would be great to be able to simulate this ... not a chance it's too big, by so very many orders of magnitude.

    http://www.netscrap.com/netscrap_detail.cfm?scrap_id=73