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."

Comments

Petaflops per second?

[mattventura]

2.57 petaflops per second

floating point operations per second per second?

Re:Petaflops per second?

[History's Coming To]

I can only presume this is a manifestation of Moore's Law, the curve is now so steep the computers are accelerating as they're running. Or maybe a typo ;)

I'm willing to bet that the top end is going to become less and less relevant and we're going to be judging processors more and more by the "flops-per-watt" and "flops-per-dollar" rating. We're already in a position where clusters of commercial games machines make more sense than a traditional supercomputer for many applications, and I dread to think how much energy could be harvested from these using some efficient heat exchangers.

Nevertheless I am impressed

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:Nevertheless I am impressed

[bmo]

- What kind of performance can an actual program achieve on Windows on that hardware?

Less than on Linux, and that's what counts in the end, isn't it?

Coupled with the fact that licenses eat into the budget a significant amount, Windows TCO is not the bargain that Microsoft would like you to believe.

--
BMO

I need one

[florescent_beige]

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.

Re:About hardware, not operating systems

[f3rret]

Isn't this about hardware, not operating systems (other than the OS being able to support the hardware)?

No, it is about two operating systems on the same hardware, one of which (GNU/Linux) outperforming the other (Windows).

And isn't the hardware simply about how much money you have to throw at it?

No, it is also about the architectural choices.

Architectural choices are irrelevant if you don't have the funding to realize them.

If you can't afford the hardware to your fancy supercomputer, you can make the best possible choices in the word, but you're still not getting a supercomputer.

Re:So why would anyone want to do this?

[Deviant]

One of the big developments of late has been in data mining of the data from your ERP system / data warehouse to answer questions about your clients/business and to find interesting patterns in your data. Couple this with the fact that buisinesses are trying to retain more and more data in a live database to make this data mining more deep/interesting and the needs for massive database servers with the power to run some crazy complex queries/reports is on the rise.

The popular example of this sort of thing in Wal-Mart who retain everything in an electronic form and can do scary things like see pictures of you based on correlating their digital security footage with your credit card purchase at a point in time at a particular register or track the differences in sales of individual products during unusual events like Hurricanes etc.
http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/14/2057228

Many businesses run Microsoft SQL Server as the backend for their ERP system and/or as their primary database. This would allow them to build a nice little HPC system to do the sorts of scary things with massive amounts of data that they have been wanting to do. I end with this funny cartoon on the subject.
http://onefte.com/2010/09/21/target-markets/