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Windows Cluster Hits a Petaflop, But Linux Retains Top-5 Spot
Twice a year, Top500.org publishes a list of supercomputing benchmarks from sites around the world; the new results are in. Reader jbrodkin writes "Microsoft says a Windows-based supercomputer has broken the petaflop speed barrier, but the achievement is not being recognized by the group that tracks the world's fastest supercomputers, because the same machine was able to achieve higher speeds using Linux. The Tokyo-based Tsubame 2.0 computer, which uses both Windows and Linux, was ranked fourth in the world in the latest Top 500 supercomputers list. While the computer broke a petaflop with both operating systems, it achieved a faster score with Linux, denying Microsoft its first official petaflop ranking."
Also in Top-500 news, reader symbolset writes with word that "the Chinese Tianhe-1A system at the National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin takes the top spot with 2.57 petaflops. Although the US has long held a dominant position in the list things now seem to be shifting, with two of the top spots held by China, one by Japan, and one by the US. In the Operating System Family category Linux continues to consolidate its supercomputing near-monopoly with 91.8% of the systems — up from 91%. High Performance Computing has come a long way quickly. When the list started as a top-10 list in June of 1993 the least powerful system on the list was a Cray Y-MP C916/16526 with 16 cores driving 13.7 RMAX GFLOP/s. This is roughly the performance of a single midrange laptop today."
2.57 petaflops per second
floating point operations per second per second?
I am impressed that Windows can actually scale to that type of hardware. However, my questions are:
- What kind of performance can an actual program achieve on Windows on that hardware?
- Are context switches from godawful slow memory allocation calls as painfully slow on this supercomputer as they are on the typical desktop?
- How badly does the ever-essential anti-malware suite drag down the supercomputer?
> Although the US has long held a dominant position in the list things now seem to be shifting, with two of the top spots held by China, one by Japan, and one by the US.
Damn, I feel like Britain after WW2.
Hey, does this mean US accents are going to seem sexy soon?
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
Isn't this about hardware, not operating systems (other than the OS being able to support the hardware)? And isn't the hardware simply about how much money you have to throw at it?
So it dual boots? press the option key or something to get into Windows and play Crysis?
FLoating point OPerationS per second. Now if you'll excuse me I need to go to the ATM machine if I can remember my PIN number.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Linux isn't exactly an ultrascalable high-performance OS either. If you were building a supercomputer operating system from the start you'd make very different design decisions than Linus did.
It is interesting that there are 6 new entrants in the top 10. Even more interesting is the fact that GPGPU accelerated supercomputers are clearly outclassing classical supercomputers such as Cray. I suspect we might be seeing something like a paradigm shift, such as when people moved from custom interconnect to GbE and infiniband. Or when custom processors began to be replaced by Commercial Off The Shelf processors.
Legally obligatory sig : My opinions are my own... etc etc
It'll do until something better comes along.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
The last two sentences on the summary are the most interesting ones. If you thought that the rate of growth of memory and processing power on standard home/office computers is out of hand just look at the supercomputers. These things are basicly old when delivered and their life is practically max. 3-5 years, after that nobody cares. And that is a pity considering how much these beasts cost and they are mostly funded with public (tax) money because running a business selling processor time from these things with their small lifetime would never be profitable.
The US had best take the processor speed race very seriously. Who knows what kind of either military or economic domination might get a leg up with super computers? And once on top it can take a century or two to dislodge a leader in technology.
because the same machine was able to achieve higher speeds using Linux
Well, duh.
Frankly I don't see how you can "supercompute" on Windows at all, with UAC and clippy popping up every other hour and whatnot.
Heh.
Looks like your trying to simulate the Higgs Boson. Would you like a tutorial?
Wait, what?
Have you ever paid attention to the OS trends in the Top500? All the proprietary OSes are disappearing. It used to be nearly all proprietary Unix and BSD. Now it's 91 percent Linux.
Here's a graph showing the demise of Unix in the Top500
http://www.top500.org/overtime/list/36/osfam
Linux doesn't scale? It fits in toasters and supercomputers. I think that's pretty good scaling if you ask me.
You could probably make the argument in 1991 when Linus smote the ground and came up with the kernel, but not anymore. You could probably even make that argument before kernel 2.0. But since then? Claiming that Linux doesn't scale well just makes you look like a Microsoft fanboy whistling while walking past the graveyard at best.
--
BMO
Yet it powers most of the top 500 supercomputers and can run on embedded platforms. If that's poor scalability, I want to know what's good scalability.
SSC
Was that achieved with or without a reliable virus scanner and firewall?
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Over the next 10 years I think we will see China, India, and other growing economies surpass the US in technology and science research, just as the US surged ahead of the "old world" countries in Europe post World War 2. More Phds, more papers, more discoveries.
As life gets more comfortable and stable for a country, in terms of things like health, energy, and infrastructure, the focus always moves away from this kind of technology advancement and onto the arts, literature, and social concerns.
Try asking someone in Europe how important they think it is for Germany, or France or the UK to have a leading position in terms of supercomputing capability. It just doesn't feature on the radar for them.
The same will become true for the US over the next decade.
Finally a Windows box capable of running Duke Nukem Forever!
> Linux isn't exactly an ultrascalable high-performance OS either.
Actually it is, it has a whole mess of features that don't become relevant until high-end stuff that the typical "haha lunix sux0rs" sad windoze weenie couldn't comprehend. It's retrogressed slightly lately out-of-box under neverrending low-end "schedule better for the desktop" pressure (hint: if you have 32768 cores, O(1) scheduling is *really handy*. Fortunately you can switch schedulers).
Coupled with the vendor-specific addons like SGI ProPack, it really is the least worst OS out there for HPC today.
I need one so I can recalculate my budget spreadsheet in a femtosecond. These nanosecond pauses are getting old.
On a lighter note, so, why isn't this stuff changing our lives? I remember in the late 90's I read a story about how gigaflop computing would revolutionize aeronautics, allowing the full simulation of weird new configurations of aircraft that would be quantum leaps over what we had. Er, have.
Can I answer my own question? I mean, can I answer two of my questions? No, make that three now. Anyway, my perspective is that the kinds of engineers who have the knowledge required to write this kind of software aren't software engineers. In fact, aeronautics is rife with some of the most horrifying software imaginable. Much of it being Excel macros. Seriously. I wrote some of it.
Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
I do scientific high-performance computing, and there is simply no reason anyone would want to run Windows on a supercomputer.
Linux has native, simple support for compiling the most common HPC languages (C and Fortran). It is open source and extensively customizable, so it's easy to make whatever changes need to be made to optimize the OS on the compute nodes, or optimize the communication latency between nodes. Adding support for exotic filesystems (like Lustre) is simple, especially since these file systems are usually developed *for* Linux. It has a simple, robust, scriptable mechanism for transferring large amounts of data around (scp/rsync) and a simple, unified mechanism for working remotely (ssh). Linux (the whole OS) can be compiled separately from source to optimize for a particular architecture (think Gentoo).
What advantage does Windows bring to a HPC project?
The summary clearly states "Linux retains a spot in the top-5", then goes on to say that China has 2 "top spots", with America and Japan only having one spot a piece. And while that may be true if you limit it to a "top-4", America is tied with China if you count the number 5 position. So why does the OP pull this slight of hand, only counting the top 4 as the "top spots" after making reference to the "top-5" as the measure of top positions? Looks like bias to me.
Give me the money to design an OS from the start.
I suspect a few hundred billion will do it.
You can only switch I/O schedulers and O(1) is a task scheduler.
Apple has "Mac vs PC", Microsoft has "Laptop Hunters", Linux has recession
Probably got confused with MIPS. Hopefully somebody here will wander over and fix it. I don't have time to get involved in a wikipedia edit war today.
BTW: if you were looking for funny mods you could have gone down the SI Pebiflops fork, or the onion-belt milliflops fork. This line isn't going to get you there.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
But will it play Flash Video smoothly at full screen?
What the hell kind of toaster runs Linux? There's hardly any justification for a mass-produced toaster to have any logic more complex than a relay. If there's an actual consumer toaster out there on the market that has linux controlling it, I'd like to see it (and buy it)!
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
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You can get the full source easily. You can switch everything, if you want.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
What the hell kind of toaster runs Linux? There's hardly any justification for a mass-produced toaster to have any logic more complex than a relay. If there's an actual consumer toaster out there on the market that has linux controlling it, I'd like to see it (and buy it)!
No, you need NetBSD for that.
Linux is and always has been designed with extreme outward AND upward scaling in mind
>always
You conveniently snipped "you could have made that argument..."
Your argument is not only existentially fallacious, but you put words in my mouth.
Cunt.
--
BMO
If you were building a supercomputer operating system from the start you'd make very different design decisions than Linus did.
Heh, one of those "start clean and it'll be so much better". There's been a kazillion patches to Linux to make it scale better, if there was anything essential holding it back they'd fork and run their own supercomputer-linux. Yes, you would use very different design decisions, but those Linux made in the early 90s aren't longer in effect either.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Some Motorola routers can be used as toasters!
I don't know if it has an OS, but my Black & Decker Infrawave toaster oven sometimes gets "hung". I sure wish there was an OS update for it, I really like it.
This toaster uses what look pretty much like toner fusing light bars to toast/cook. It is really fast, and gives off a nice evil glow when it is working.
The only problem with it is that you can sometimes confuse it into a very dangerous state - i.e. it can go FULL ON, and the "off" switch has no effect. In this state the door-interlock switch doesn't even work! (I can't even fathom the stupidity of that design... I can hear the switch click, so I guess there must be a hardware engineer's equivalent of the Daily WTF? to explain it. I am a software guy, and even I know that the safety interlock ought to directly cut the heater power, even if you want to let the LCD/button logic run. I guess the logic board is just being "told" the switch went off and is supposed to do something about it. Sheesh.)
Futhermore, pulling the plug from the wall (for any length of time) only turns it off -- until you plug it in again! Then FULL ON, no stopping!
Rather than returning it, I've just instructed everyone in the household a work-around I have discovered; When Stuck "on", simply select "toast level 1", even while it is running already. I assume this is the least cooking it can, do, then press "start"... it will turn off after about one "toast level 1" more's worth of time, then it is back to normal (until the next time you piss interrupt it at the wrong time, usually by opening the door while it is full-on, but near the end of a cycle.)
It is a strange world where my desktop PC is more predictable than my toaster oven. (In terms of not "crashing".)
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Except not, as the guy you're responding too pointed out. "other proprietary and open OSes" have been pushed out of the Top 500 easily and gently by Linux, as the graph shows.
You will probably laugh but banks and finances do not: Excel spreadsheets.
Microsoft HPC solution allows distribute it across many nodes.
Trust me: *huge* money are there (alas, not for you, not for me and not for science).
It's much cheaper for a bank to rent a supercomputer to calculate a heavy spreadsheet written by programming-challenged but money-wise CPA then to hire a money-challenged, HPC-wise guy to rewrite (and perpetually modify it on a short notice) this spreadsheet to FORTRAN.
Toasters that run linux : Toaster (photobucket, jpg)
You're welcome. By the way, if you happen to come across these on amazon, please share the link. Thank you.
You need a lower user score to understand.
Top machine: 2500 x 10^12 floating point ops x 64 bits = 160 x 10^15 bits per second
Human brain: 10^11 neurons x 10^4 synapses x 100 Hz firing rate = 100 x 10^15 bits per second.
I am not saying it will wake up tomorrow and launch Skynet, but until now inadequate hardware was a barrier to human-level AI.
And yes, I am quite aware that a synapse firing is not directly comparable to a binary bit. Call this a rough comparison.
The most awesome toaster in the universe, that's what!
Also it can rip a hole in the fabric of space time, so um, don't go back and kill any dinosaurs.
Well, apparently it doesn't scale down in size to the desktop. If you don't believe me, just look at the usage statistics. Top500 servers: 91% linux. Desktop: 91% Windows.
Just like a jet-engine is a great way to power a huge aircraft, no so great for powering your lawn mower or chain saw.
And no it's not flame bait, when you're answering a non-rhetorical question.
Mostly because of development costs.
Much cheaper to work with linux than build a new one from scratch.
XML - A clever joke would be here if
I made a flux capacitor out of a old toilet paper roll, some wire and toothpicks last night. I use it to power my windows 7 box that spell checks my code.
Just like a jet-engine is a great way to power a huge aircraft, no so great for powering your lawn mower or chain saw.
Maybe you don't have a jet-powered lawn mower, but maybe you're just not that serious about your yard work.
Any other application built for windows has the same issue.
I work for a company doing modeling for insurance, and the software for catastrophe modeling (RMS, AIR, Eqecat,) all are windows only. The simulations and models take days to run for a large data set, and the software/modeling companies aren't about to switch off of windows for the software licensed from them, and there is nowhere else to go.
I'm a concientious
The thing with MS is they won't sell you licenses to their older products but they WILL sell you volume licenses to their newer proucts that include "downgrade rights".
So sales get chalked up as sales of the latest version whatever version the customer actually uses.
Things are even worse for normal consumers who usually don't get the option of downgrading.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
From the article:
If the machine broke a petaflop with both operating systems (Linux and Windows), how was it denied an official Petaflop ranking? It achieved it, why doesn't it count? Is each machine only allowed one ranking? Seems sort of odd, the ranking of the same machine with different OSs would be interesting, no?
Ken
Yet, it works fine on phones and android is outselling others. Almost like their might be something special about the desktop market, some sort of market tampering by a player or two.
Wait, people do high performance computing on SPREADSHEETS?
My world just exploded. Iluvatar, can't they find some schmuck to code them in Perl, even?
The point is to NOT have anybody to code it at all.
Besides, I think Excel easily beats Perl in terms of MIPS/FLOPS (but probably not wisely applied Python+NumPy).
Spreadsheets are coding, just a different sort...
Yes, "coded" by a specialist in the target area. A perl (or Fortran) schmuck is not a CPA specialist to trust to.
Your negative response reminds me about mini-era programmers' response to 1-2-3 and IBM-PC ;)
Welcome to the world of tomorrow!
But I sure feel your pain.
And please (re-)read "Diaspora" by Greg Egan. Those folks sure aint need no stinkin programmers! :)
"Yet, it works fine on phones and android is outselling others" - by h4rr4r (612664) on Sunday November 14, @09:08PM (#34227208)
A Linux variant, in the Android OS, is also showing security vulnerabilities -> http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/10/11/14/0115255/Android-Holes-Allow-Secret-Installation-of-Apps and everyone around here seems to state that Linux is immune to security problems, and Windows is chock full of them... funny that article link above (which isn't a first either) then, eh?
Don't forget the jet powered beer cooler.
That has nothing to do with scalability, and everything to do with usability.
"scaling" obviously does not mean what you think it does.
Also, you need to work on your equivalence making skills, so far they look rather "false."
Cheers.
As a professional HPC programmer, using "days to run for a large data set" is absolutely meaningless to me.
Define large. Means different things to different people.
.
What the hell kind of toaster runs Linux? There's hardly any justification for a mass-produced toaster to have any logic more complex than a relay.
Howdy doodly do. How's it going? I'm Talkie, Talkie Toaster, your chirpy breakfast companion. Talkie's the name, toasting's the game. Anyone like any toast?
[from Red Dwarf IV: White Hole]
Chinese Tianhe-1A system at the National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin
Try again, with a country that doesn't have extensive First World knockoffs.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
The reasons Linux is so successful on HPC clusters are numerous. Historically, Linux was the best solution for many reasons. In particular, HPC clearly demonstrates why "open" is superior to closed approaches to a markt.
HPC for Primates. Read Cluster Monkey
In this case, the 91% figure for servers is entirely accurate (because it is good for Linux) whilst the 91% desktop for Windows figure is one or more of the following:-
a straightforward lie by Microsoft/some stooges of Microsoft;
distorted because a lot of people run Linux but emulate Windows, or something;
distorted because I and all my hip friends use Mac OSX and so therefore the rest of the world must too.
[if all else fails] only achieved by Microsoft's illegal business tactics;
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Exactly. It's a total scam and lie. Nobody REALLY uses windows except clueless MBA wannabe executives who don't understand computers.
Well, them and our parents.
ok, and our friends.
alright, us too. we all have windows computers (somewhere in our lives) but SHHHHH don't tell anybody because we all WANT to run linux on 100% of our computers, right?
So yeah, pretty much everybody except the art department (for some reason I still don't understand, probably because I'm not an artist) uses windows on at least a semi-regular basis.
Intel used to sell these a while back. You can still find tons of them all around the world.
How about this one And here's a community site devoted to such ideas.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
It doesn't matter what large means to you; you weren't involved in the discussion. It also does not speak well of your abilities with numbers if "days" means nothing to you. It's multiple, as in more than one.
A 10gb database may not be huge, but the complexity of the convolutions that need to be performed on the location losses to find the loss curve is a bit difficult. Some re-insurers have an arbitrarily large hardware budget (in the millions per analysis machine, since they only need a couple,) and the software maxes out its ability to use multiple processors after 16 or so, and so HPC solutions in windows would be very useful.
I'm a concientious