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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."
Computers still seem to be getting exponentially faster by the year ... when will Silicon give way?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:TOP500-2008.svg
I think therefore I am... a Linux geek.
Holy crap, the supercomputers are so fast they're in the future!
Looks like a 2nd NSCS supercomputer located in China is in the top 10. Does that make it "Chinese"?
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)
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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How about a direct link to the actual site - or even the actual list?
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
I think this is the first benchmarking article I've read in years where the organizers actually know what their benchmark program does: http://www.top500.org/project/linpack. Refreshing to see real statistics (as good as they can make them), instead of the normal crap that is most hardware articles anymore.
I wonder what kind of score these beasts would get on 3DMark ?
The list should more accurately be called, "Top 500 publicly-acknowledged supercomputers." You can go right on thinking that the US NSA, British MI6, and even some private industries (AT&T?) don't have vastly larger supers that are not publicly disclosed.
I wish the graphic has a "By Cores". Wow, a computer with over 120,000 cores! Phenomenal.
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?
Yeah, most "supercomputers" are distributed systems, just like SETI@Home. The only real difference between a traditional supercomputer and a network like SETI@Home is how spread out the nodes are and the amount of bandwith between them.
I just can't stop thinking about a beowulf cluster of those!
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
Not even remotely true. The big difference is not the bandwidth between the nodes, it's the latency. Nodes in a supercomputer can exchange data in well under a millisecond. Nodes in SETI@Home can exchange information in a few hundred milliseconds. Don't think that's important? A single 2GHz core runs 200,000,000 cycles in the time that it takes to send a message between two relatively close SETI nodes. It executes closer to 200,000 instructions in the time that it takes to exchange data between two supercomputer nodes. This means that for things that are not embarrassingly parallel problems, a pair of supercomputer nodes will be up to 100 times faster than a pair of SETI nodes with identical processors. In practice, they won't spend all of their time communicating, so they'll probably only be ten times faster. Of course, when you scale this up to more than two nodes, the delays are increased a lot on a SETI-like system, so something using a few hundred nodes can be far more than only two orders of magnitude faster on a supercomputer.
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I doubt it. They may have more aggregate computing power, but they'd do badly on the benchmarks that the Top500 list runs, which depend on interconnect speed as well as raw processor throughput. Rendering is an intrinsically parallel problem. In the absolute worst case, you can render frames independently. If you are ray tracing, you can run each ray separately. Other image and object space partitioning schemes let you trivially parallelise other rendering strategies. This means that render farms typically buy fast computers, but connect them with cheap interconnect - often only GigE or similar. If you tried benchmarking them, the interconnect latency and throughput would be the bottleneck.
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Would be interesting to see how the botnets compare
It depends on what you consider a supercomputer. If you have 100 systems running a single cluster for virtual machines, is that a supercomputer because all of the servers are working together? When you go to Google to search for something that goes to one of their datacenters, all of their systems are hooked together to allow very fast searching and serving of results. Is the system behind Google search a supercomputer?
can seti@home run linpack?
I was curious if any privately owned(non-corporate or government) machines made the list, and where they placed.
In years past as many as 7 out of 10 officially listed computers were for security research. Now, contrary to the article, that's down to 2.
Jaguar -- general research (http://www.nccs.gov/computing-resources/jaguar/)
Roadrunner -- security research (http://www.lanl.gov/)
Kraken XT5 -- general research (National Institute for Computational Sciences/University of Tennessee)
Tianhe-1 -- unstated
Pleiades -- security research (nukes)
"Recently expanded to accommodate growing demand for high-performance systems able to run the most complex nuclear weapons science calculations, BGL now has a peak speed of 596 teraFLOPS. In partnership with IBM, the machine was scaled up from 65,536 to 106,496 nodes in five rows of racks; the 40,960 new nodes have double the memory of those installed in the original machine"
Intrepid -- General research
Ranger -- General research
Red Sky -- General research
It makese me wonder whether the machines for nuclear research went underground or maybe it just doesn't take a top ranking supercomputer to calculate a nuclear explosion anymore.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Do you actually think that everything was and is invented in US? A man that doesn't know the history will lose the future.
If you're gonna open it up like that, Folding@Home would almost certainly take first place.
http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=osstats
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Linpack doesn't stress interconnect by that much, however. But yes, there are quite a few systems not on that list.
The sidebar about treemaps is as interesting as the main article. An interesting way to display complex data in a compact form.
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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Next bulletin:
"Vista-based benchmark testing complete - converts Jaguar to big pussycat"
"I love animals! Some are cute, others are tasty, what's not to like?" - Betsy Schroeder, Jeopardy contestant
"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.)
Are you counting the entire list of computers or just the top 10? Is the first list supposed to be ones used for security research and the second for general research? If so, Red Sky and possibly others are used for security research.
The change is that most super computers at the national laboratories are not single-use, and are thus listed as general research even if they spend a large proportion of their cycles on security research.
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?
Weather simulation, perhaps? Weather has a huge impact on crop yields.
Or perhaps bioinformatics for genetic tinkering.
I always thought computers (and supercomputers) were nothing more than proprietary implementations of someone's attempt to simplify their pseudocode. It all boiled down to memory and bus bandwidth issues, not the speed of the processor. That's where the DEC/Compaq/HP Alpha was retired as was HP PA-RISC, yet theoretically the Sun SPARC and IBM Power designs should succeed. Instead we see these astonishingly bogus processors that you call "general purpose" when they are nothing more the biproduct of bad marketing coupled with monopolized software lewding from the likes of Microsoft. Remember it was Microsoft that was pushing the industry for what they termed as a "Windows-ready" server that allowed you to run other competitive operating systems despite having drivers that were only "Windows-ready." They tried to destroy DEC Alpha mid-stream, and that's when Apple backed-out of their bid to purchase Alpha from DEC to be their core desktop and server architecture. It realy broke my heart to see Apple pass Alpha to lease a castrated IBM Power (PowerPC) processor. Alpha and Apple would have been God-tier, but instead it was squandered into the misplaced butchery called Pentium 4 and Athlon XP's hypertransport-bus.
I am truly rooting for Sun SPARC to pick-up where the apical bud of Alpha was suddenly terminated, for legacy purposes that the true stylish white-box Unix systems should continue. Sun and HP's PARISC have always had the most elegant of memory bus architectures, and that's where DEC was heading to finish their product on using Rambus technologies, but things just tend to fumble around.
At-least now you can get a once $7k dual Alpha rackmount for under $200 and it is still faster and more power-efficient than a modern Intel and AMD system. Still, it's bad. Just bad, man.
This is my chance to snark back at the SPARCophiles at my former employer, Sun. You'll notice that Sun has a respectable presence on this list, lagging just behind SGI. And not a single Sun system on the Top 500 runs SPARC. They're all x64.
The SPARC Uber Alles mentality at Sun in its last days was really frustrating. I was working on x64 systems that were widely considered the best in their class. But you couldn't get the marketing and sales people to make an effort to sell them. They'd march into sales meetings with prospective customers that already had extensive Intel or AMD investment, and try to tell them that they really needed to abandon all that and switch to SPARC.
I once told one these bozos, "1998 called. It wants its sales strategy back." Probably had something to do with my being shown the door.
Server farms that is! Thanks WETA.
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Back in early 1980 I headed up a team of techs to install Wang VS systems all over China. I had to take a train to Harbin (far north) from Beijing because it was still too cold to fly there.
I was a visiting American scientist.. and as such in each province i visited the governor would have banquet in my honor and we would all drink wu-shing pigu (5-star beer) and eat great food. For those who know me personally know that I do not like being the center of attention so this was really out of my comfort zone.
Dr. Wang was in Beijing visiting his original homeland and kin, and I had the occasion to meet his siblings. For those who may not be aware, Dr. Wang (American-Chinese) was instrumental in developing core memory and created Wang Laboratories in the Boston, Massachusetts area..
I speak only a little Chinese so the old timers still spoke English back from when America and China were friends the first time. The country was opened up again in 1979 with President Nixon creating a trading partnership with them. Several places an individual from China would say I was the first American seen since before the Chiang Kei-Shek era.
What was funny (actually tragic) was two old timers who managed the Import-Export department in China decided they liked me and that I could be trusted so they wanted me to be their contact in the USA for their manufacturing... I thought to myself... this will go nowhere. And now it is a trillion dollar industry. I was always a great tech but lousy at business.
Anyway, installing all those computers and helping the programmers and operators in China to learn the systems has assisted in paving the way for China to emerge as one of the leaders in technology.
I have the utmost respect for their way of Being and thinking although it is quite different from the traditional USA methods.
And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make