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Swiss Supercomputer Edges US Out of Top Spot (bbc.com)
There have only been two times in the last 24 years where the U.S. has been edged out of the top spot of the world's most powerful supercomputers. Now is one of those times. "An upgrade to a Swiss supercomputer has bumped the U.S. Department of Energy's Cray XK7 to number four on the list rating these machines," reports the BBC. "The only other time the U.S. fell out of the top three was in 1996." The top two slots are occupied by Chinese supercomputers. From the report. The U.S. machine has been supplanted by Switzerland's Piz Daint system, which is installed at the country's national supercomputer center. The upgrade boosted its performance from 9.8 petaflops to 19.6. The machine is named after a peak in the Grison region of Switzerland. One petaflop is equal to one thousand trillion operations per second. A "flop" (floating point operation) can be thought of as a step in a calculation. The performance improvement meant it surpassed the 17.6 petaflop capacity of the DoE machine, located at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. The U.S. is well represented lower down in the list, as currently half of all the machines in the top 10 of the list are based in North America. And the Oak Ridge National Laboratory looks set to return to the top three later this year, when its Summit supercomputer comes online. This is expected to have a peak performance of more than 100 petaflops.
Read the summary, it was bumped out of the top 3 to become #4.
the Swiss just copied Calipari
FTA:
With the two Chinese supercomputers and one Swiss system occupying the top of the rankings, this is the second time in the 24-year history of the TOP500 list that the United States has failed to secure any of the top three positions. The only other time this occurred was in November 1996, when three Japanese systems captured the top three spots.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
SAD!
This wouldn't have happened if Hillary had won.
NSA had no comment.
Something tells me NSA or other state entities have faster computing power
Why would they? The NSA does cryptanalysis, text scanning, and signal analysis. None of these require a supercomputer.
If your tasks can be run in parallel on distributed systems, then a supercomputer is a waste of money. Supercomputers are for tasks that have Amdahl Bottlenecks, or tight data dependencies.
Thanks for that. It made me think. (No mod points or I'd bump your post insightful.)
Hammers are great if you want to drive nails, but saws are better for cutting down trees and screw drivers are better for turning screws. The best tool for the job is based on the work you want to do rather than the power of the tool. Saying the NSA likely has the biggest supercomputer is akin to saying they have the biggest hammer. I'm sure the NSA has impressive hammers and impressive supercomputers, but neither is necessarily the tool most important to the job they're trying to do.
That said, I'd love to know what the NSA uses their computer budget to buy and accomplish, even if I couldn't ever talk about it. (Hint, hint! If you're working at the NSA on their computer science projects and want to blow a yokel's mind, please get in touch... and I promise to only freak a little bit when you pop up a message on my "secure" system.)
B) Eliminate all the stupid users. This is frowned upon by society.
The system configuration is outlined here: http://www.cscs.ch/publications/highlights/2017/piz_daint_one_of_the_most_powerful_supercomputers_in_the_world/index.html. The storage is listed as Cray Sonexion, which is Lustre-based. The Cray Aries network has also shown itself to scale pretty well. Of course, the LINPACK benchmark that's the basis of the Top 500 list doesn't really measure filesystem or network performance, so the relative merit of those subsystems can't be judged effectively by those results.
The Top500 data also included the results of the HPCG benchmark (http://www.hpcg-benchmark.org/), which has this stated purpose: "HPCG is designed to exercise computational and data access patterns that more closely match a different and broad set of important applications, and to give incentive to computer system designers to invest in capabilities that will have impact on the collective performance of these applications."
The Swiss system is ranked #3 on the HPCG list as well and also #6 on the Green 500 list of most energy-efficient supercomputers, so it's a fairly well-balanced system and not just some machoFLOPS stunt.
It depends on what a nation wants to do.
Perfecting and fully testing quantum encryption for their mil?
Collect it all telco sorting with full decryption support?
Nuclear weapons simulations to keep an old stockpile ready or to try new designs?
Dont want to go nuclear? Try other simulating other very complex weapons systems that are difficult to test without other nations asking questions.
Climate change bragging rights on the international stage with the best weather model to push some political cause?
Some university or think tank wants to attract the worlds best students to spend cash locally "learning" for years?
Different nations have very different needs for their public supercomputers.
A financial centre?
"Agriculture"
Prestige without needing to spend a lot on a good news story?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
"Even Sharper Swiss Army Knives?"
I have an IBM box in my collection that is a POWER1 system. It runs AIX and I think it will do 100 picoFlops or something.
With POWER1 the central processor was a whole set of chips. It's also Microchannel Architecture.
Trump's home PC that he browses Fox "News" on for non-fake news is more powerful than this Swiss PoS. His PC's the greatest, has the bestest Interwebs and most ultraflops.
The NSA is a clandestine foreign intelligence and counter intelligence agency empowered to protect the country. So if they do have "backdoor" access to various network connected devices and posses a large and powerful distributed computer then they are doing their job. And I think the "backdoor" claims have not been sufficiently proved to exists. Just like the old claims about Windows having a "backdoor". No one has every provided any proof of a Windows backdoor and they have been looking a long time. If you make claims of "backdoors" you need to provide proof instead of speculation. If their were intentional "backdoors" they would have been found by now. If you there are "backdoors" built-in CPUS, Routers, and other network hardware you will also need real proof instead of just theories and possibilities. If people are so sure these "backdoors" they can surely offer proof? And if these "backdoors" do exists people would have been using them. All the people spending the time and effort trying to find and create exploits could save a lot of time by just using these pre-existing "backdoors".
Top spot != Top three. Is it too much to ask for an accurate title? Clickbait trumps accuracy? I can't think of another reason how this title could have slipped through.
This Piz Daint is efficient, too, consuming less than 30% as much power as the Opteron-based Titan. TaihuLight is still very, very impressive, though the new one at Oak Ridge should top it.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
Nah, they're mining bitcoin.
Uh, you mean Ethereum? This isn't the old days of 2016.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
Other thing I was wondering - are Xeon CPUs used for all of these, or something else, like POWER 8?
At that time, the CPU was a bunch of chips, known collectively as the RS/6000.
Yep. That's what is printed on the outside of the box.
From https://www.top500.org/news/top500-list-refreshed-us-edged-out-of-third-place/
"Intel continues to be the dominant supplier of TOP500 chips. Either Xeon or Xeon Phi processors power 464 of the 500 systems. IBM Power processors are in 21 systems, while AMD Opteron CPUs are present in six systems. Processor share, with regard to supplier, has not changed appreciably over the last year."
The same supercomputer center has 2 redundant clusters dedicated to meteo forecasts, yes: http://www.cscs.ch/computers/k...
And yes, the forecasts are fancy.
after hours Bitcoin mining...
Yeah yeah I know, named after a mountain.
But I would like to see a supercomputer named Deez Nuts.
It's top x spots where x = current spot index.
Requiem for the American Dream
Although it's been demonstrated repeatedly that the front door is open so I'm calling 'moot!'
Requiem for the American Dream
The name of the supercomputer "Piz Daint" is extremely offensive in many Europen languages.
But it looks like the owners don't care.
I think a far more interesting article would be what are these systems being used for on a day-to-day basis?
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
But if the backdoor is for Windows on specific targets, via Windows Update, then it is highly improbably that they will ever be uncovered. Unless a very highly skilled technical expert was monitoring the target and also had the ability to decrypt the encrypted Windows Update data.
Then you have proven that Windows, in general public, do NOT have backdoor. Specific targets are special cases (needed more due diligences in the process) and shouldn't be generalized because of "there exists" condition.
Sweden? How would that help beating Switzerland and China???
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I think we'll be okay. The XK7 will run AOL just fine for Rick Perry.
A large amount of the FLOPS is usually GPUs or something similar. Like NVIDIA GPUs or Intel Xeon Phis.
Found the German!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."