Top 500 Supercomputers

Anonymous Coward writes "sendmail.net has a piece on the new Top500 list of supercomputers. 'So who came out on top? Well, three US Department of Energy machines have taken spots one, two, and three to lead the list: ASCI Red (manufactured by Intel) at Sandia National Labs in Albuquerque, ASCI Blue-Pacific (IBM) at Lawrence Livermore Labs in Berkeley, and ASCI Blue Mountain (SGI) at Los Alamos. These are the only three systems to exceed 1 TF/s on the Linpack benchmark, and represent 7.4 percent of the total Flop/s on the list.' The story notes that the average growth rates for the list exceed the number set by Moore's Law. "

Comments

Moore's Law Not Broken

[zealot]

I hate articles like this. In the first place theres the, "The new Top500 numbers are in, and your laptop has never looked so tragically slow." These supercomputers are all massively parallelized machines using regular microprocessors. The actual speed of the machine, like ASCI Red, is determined by the processors used, which in this case are just normal Intel processors. So you can go out and buy a machine that computes instructions just as fast as ASCI Red. The difference is that it can do more things at once because of all the processors involved. Does it make your laptop look slow? Hell no, because if you had ASCI Red, you wouldn't have any apps that take advantage of its parallelism to run on it anyway.

Secondly, Moore's Law is the following (from http://www.intel.com/intel/museum/25anniv/hof/moor e.htm):
In 1965, Gordon Moore was preparing a speech and made a
memorable observation. When he started to graph data about the
growth in memory chip performance, he realized there was a striking
trend. Each new chip contained roughly twice as much capacity as its
predecessor, and each chip was released within 18-24 months of the
previous chip. If this trend continued, he reasoned, computing power
would rise exponentially over relatively brief periods of time.

Moore's observation, now known as Moore's Law, described a trend
that has continued and is still remarkably accurate. It is the basis for
many planners' performance forecasts. In 26 years the number of
transistors on a chip has increased more than 3,200 times, from 2,300
on the 4004 in 1971 to 7.5 million on the Pentium® II processor.

Since the CPUs in supercomputers use standard processors, and Moore's Law applies to these processors, his law is still intact. His law is about CPUs, not systems.