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The Top 10 Supercomputers, Illustrated
1sockchuck writes "The twice-a-year list of the Top 500 supercomputers documents the most powerful systems on the planet. Many of these supercomputers are striking not just for their processing power, but for their design and appearance as well. Here's a visual guide to the top finishers in the latest Top 500 list, which was released this week at the SC11 conference."
What a let down, I was hoping to see a visual guide to these, you know something like how many small European countries would need to be covered in Cray 1's to equal there power!
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Would the computers be a little cheaper without all the ornate decorative racks? Though I must admit TERA-100 looks quite stylish.
Supercomputer seller: "What do you want in your supercomputer?"
Supercomputer buyer: "640K petaflop/s, Intel Gargantuaium nodes, POWER9 nodes, SPARC and Kindle nodes . . . "
Supercomputer seller: "Anything else . . . ?"
Supercomputer buyer: " . . . a shrubbery! One that looks nice . . . and not too expensive . . . "
Supercomputer seller: "Um . . . okay . . . "
Supercomputer buyer: ". . . and . . . another shrubbery . . . only a bit higher, so we get the two level effect, with a path down the middle for the service technician to walk along . . . "
Supercomputer seller: "Your supercomputer shall be the fastest in the world . . . for a few weeks, anyway . . . and it will look nice!"
What if Apple built a supercomputer? Those accessories would cost a fortune, but you could really flaunt them to the supercomputing community.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
adventure game utilising the combined resources of these machines.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Ok ok something that will run a flash version of Crysis running off of firefox at an acceptable frame rate.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
A Top500 site where Petaflop count takes second place to aesthetic appeal.
Let's have Hypercubes, spheres, ultraflats, invisibles, ultraquiets, computers-as-furniture, computers-as-art, cyberpunk, retro; let your imagination run riot.
Just remember, it was my idea.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
Show us the racks!
Yes! Show us the racks!
Wait, we were talking about the car show girls, right?
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When did the Top500 become a competition to see who could paint the prettiest picture on the side of a rack alleyway. I clicked the link expecting to see cables, guts, sweet AC units, and other nerd porn.
Instead I got something designed by a marketing department and in some cases just graphical rendering.
Nerd pleasing fail!
The first top 500 list was published in June 1993. The fastest computer on that list was a CM-5/1024 made by Thinking Machines Corporation. It was rated at: 59.70 Rmax(GFs) and 131.00 Rpeak(GFs).
Last place on that first top 500 list (scroll down) was held by a VP-200 made by Fujitsu/SNI which had 1 core and was rated at 0.422 Rmax(GFs) and 0.533 Rpeak(GFs).
I've heard the expression about carrying a supercomputer in your pocket - how close are we? I'd expect most of the latest Android/iPhone/smartphones can beat that last-place finisher from 1993. I'm doubtful that any of these devices could beat that first place finisher, but I suspect desktops (especially with GPUs) should be there by now. If you're are interested, you can get the software from here.
Any takers? How does YOUR system compare?
isn't it weird that there's such a huge difference between #1 and #2?
#1 K computer --> 705k cores, 1,410,048 Gb memory, 11,280,384 Rpeak(GFs)
#2 Tianhe-1A --> 186k cores, 229,376 Gb memory, 4,701,000 Rpeak(GFs)
K has ~6x the memory, ~6x the cores, and ~3x the Rpeak of Tianhe!
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
Something to run slashdots unoptimised JavaScript at an acceptable frame rate!
There used to be an easy-to-find graph showing the improvement over time of number one, number 500, and the total of 1-500. It gave me warm fuzzies to see the steady increase. I can't find that chart anymore. Help?
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
the NSA has always been at the forefront of supercomputing, and it has always been incredibly secretive about it.
who knows about other nations intelligence agencies
the NSA has always been at the forefront of supercomputing, and it has always been incredibly secretive about it.
who knows about other nations intelligence agencies
Until the day arrives when the NSA declassifies some of the super-powerful technology it's supposed to always have, my bet is that they only have slightly evolved versions of what you see here.
The NSA has no processor foundries. They have no manufacturing plants. They don't have chip designers on staff (or, at least, not very many.) The amount of money they'd have to pay to get custom super-parts developed is dwarfed by the billions and billions spent to improve commodity architectures. There's just no way they can get anything that regular people can't also get.
So they're almost certainly dependent on just buying more. In other words, linearly scaling the machines you see here. Maybe theirs have 2x-10x as many cores. Maybe they have five hundred of their own.
If I had to guess, I'd say the NSA's cryptographic prowess comes mostly from algorithms, not hardware. They have the best human codebreakers, doubtless able to shave FLOPs off here and there.
More importantly, though, they have SIGINT. Why decrypt when there's a treasure trove of information available to any law enforcement agency that has taps on any phone, GPS on any vehicle, traffic monitors on any Internet connection they choose, with no pesky subpoena or judicial oversight?
The Tegra 3 chip that's showing up in phones this spring and Transformer Prime tablet now is about 7.2 GFLOPs. That's more than enough to be top 10 in 1993. Current ARM architectures might go all the way up to fast enough to take that number one spot in reference sample designs now but they consume too much power to go in your pocket on retail shelves as yet. Maybe in a year or two.
Mali T658 and PowerVR are two to watch here. Mali is supposed to go up to 350 GFLOPs. It still amazes me that in 1993 that machine cost about $70 million in today's money and you can almost match it today for under $500.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
according to James Bamford's books, especially the last two, they actually did have a chip foundry, they have been at the top of several supercomputer programs, and they are the only reason that CRAY survived in a capitalist economy where massive supercomputing R&D doesn't have a quick ROI.
we don't know what they have today. but we know what they had in the past, vs what everyone thought was going on in the past. and what everyone thought was wrong.