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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."

19 of 130 comments (clear)

  1. June?! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Holy crap, the supercomputers are so fast they're in the future!

  2. 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 Pharmboy · · Score: 5, Insightful

      All our admins and all of our users only know Microsoft systems. Training isn't free.

      So your users can't use Linux on the server? Or is it that all the users use super computers on the desktop? Our biz has all MS on the desktop and all Linux on the server. Obviously it is completely seamless. As for the admins, any admin worth their salt is always learning new things to just keep up with technology as it changes. Learning Linux by installing it on one system to start is trivial, and in certain situations, much easier to setup than Windows, such as DNS servers, web servers, etc.

      If your admins can only work on a server if it uses a mouse, you need new admins.

      --
      Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
    2. Re:Linux by Black+Art · · Score: 3, Insightful

      In my experience Windows admins require *MUCH* more training than Linux admins. There is much more "black magic" that they need to know to be good at their jobs.

      A Windows admin needs to know all the secret registry hacks to make things run well. They need to know all the non-intuitive places that Microsoft hides the settings for whatever services need to be configured. They also need to know how to recover things when it all goes horribly wrong.

      Most Linux systems have text files to configure things. The files are in a predictable place. Updates are pretty easy and clear.

      But Microsoft has scammed people into believing that leaving it harder than just putting up with the same old crap. In this case I just wish that people did get what they pay for...

         

      --
      "Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
    3. 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
  3. 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
  4. 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 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.

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      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    2. 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.

    3. 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.

  5. 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.

    --
    I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  6. 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?

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    When information is power, privacy is freedom.
  7. Should Say "Top 500 Publicly-Acknowledged Supers" by cshbell · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  8. 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?

    1. Re:Food? What food? by tivoKlr · · Score: 3, Funny

      Maybe they're using it to determine why anyone would eat Haggis.

      --
      Ocean is land, covered with water.
  9. Re:Computers keep getting faster by Entropius · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Parallel tasks are the whole point of using a supercomputer. The gains made in speed for sequential tasks really haven't been that great; Moore's Law for sequential tasks fell apart a while back.

    Being able to parallelize a task is a prerequisite for putting it on a supercomputer.

  10. Re:SETI@HOME has 3 million or so nodes... by TheRaven64 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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 am TheRaven on Soylent News
  11. 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.

  12. 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