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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."
I'd say Google datacenters accelerate at about that rate.
One petaflop, two petaflops... (Anyway, I didn't know that MS has already shipped so many flops...)
Ezekiel 23:20
2.57 petaflops per second
floating point operations per second per second?
Well-spotted. It appears that this particular supercomputer gets faster the longer it is left running. Clearly the reason that it ran faster with Linux than with Windows was because in the latter case it needed to be restarted after every Patch Tuesday, thus limiting the potential speed increase to 6.88 zettaflops.
So it dual boots? press the option key or something to get into Windows and play Crysis?
Ooooh, that hertz!
No one anywhere, except in your imagination, said Windows wasn't *able* to run on the extra nodes.
I figure it was because the testers couldn't afford the licensing fees.
- How badly does the ever-essential anti-malware suite drag down the supercomputer?
Shouldn't be needed since it should be extremely hard for malware to get into such a controlled environment to begin with.
Digital Fortress?
PlusFive Slashdot reader for Android. Can post comments.
But will it play Flash Video smoothly at full screen?
I'm not sure that Google's data centres could qualify as a single super computer with each node solving a different part of the same problem...
World domination isn't a single problem?
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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This is why Windows HPC is going to change everything