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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."
adventure game utilising the combined resources of these machines.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
The entire building is a plastic white egg, there's a power button, a really big plug, 1 Ethernet jack, 1 usb port and several proprietary ports that no one but Apple uses. The preferred interface is a small touchscreen kiosk carefully hidden with tasteful landscaping.
There are no user-serviceable parts inside, opening the shell voids the warranty. What few upgrade options available when ordering will have exorbitant mark up and it will be slightly slower and a lot more expensive than most of its competitors. If anything breaks the recommended solution is to demolish it on site and order a new one.
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.
Well supercomputers tend to do look nice. If you are going to pay millions of dollars on a computer it better look pretty darn cool to impress the board of directors who approved it.
I use to work with a sales man who worked for Cray. Those old supercomputers with all those blinking lights knobs and buttons were there just to make the computer look impressive. They were not overly functional. Companies who buy these expensive computers would flaunt them and have them quite visible in their organization. Not just stuck in a back room.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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!
Looking at some photograph ,I see your point - something plain or just black with some blinkenlighten like the Connection Machine would have been enough.
Though, when you buy a system like that, the cost isn't the hardware, it's the field and support engineers available 24/7, customer support, projects and power consumption that are the big costs. There used to be a joke, "Buy a super-computer from us, and we'll throw the building in for free".
Modern day supercomputer systems use a standardized rack frame system and intercommunication fabric so that the oldest and slowest nodes can be pulled out, while the newest and fastest ones can be slotted in straight away. That removes the overhead of having to construct a new building, power supply system, air conditioning and network infrastructure just to do a simple upgrade.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Way back in '03, Virginia Tech built a cluster of 1,100 Mac G5's. It came in at #3 on the Top 500 list that year, and at $5.2M, it was a fraction of the cost of the next cheapest supercomputer in the top ten. And it was assembled by students in 3 weeks, using stock G5 towers fitted with InfiniBand cards.
It was later upgraded to G5 xServe boxes, and as of 2008, was still ranked 281 on the Top 500 list.
Here's a short promo film that VT produced: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLujLtgBJC0
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.