Top 500 Supercomputer List Released

sundling writes "The heavily anticipated Top 500 Supercomputer list has been released. There is a Sevenfold increase in AMD Opteron processors on the list. Two sections of an IBM prototype took spots in the top 10 and the famous Apple cluster didn't make the list, because it was out of service for hardware upgrades. When complete, the new IBM cluster is sure to take the top spot from the Earth Simulator."

What I find interesting...

[Noryungi]

Is that Disney is #57 in the top500, while Weta has the #77 and #80 spots... impressive showing by the entertainment companies.

On the other hand, PDI (Pacific Data Images -- Shrek), Pixar and ILM do not appear in the list, which is also very interesting.

Re:What I find interesting...

[gadget junkie]

... I guess that's because rendering is inherently scaleable, i.e. there is no advantage in building one big, bad ubermachine. Far simpler to parcel out frames between any and odd number of renderfarms, many of which you may not even own.

It is a "make or buy" situation. Given an efficient payment system, I do not see why they should not render using some program similar to Folding@home.

Re:Jesus

[Anonymous Coward]

Supercomputers are big calculators. If there is a GUI, you run it on your own computers.

And, before you ask, supercomputers generally won't make your games run faster. The game would have to be completely rewritten to take advantage of the architecture -- and, even if there is graphics hardware installed, most HPC architectures aren't designed to deliver a high framerate.

Re:"heavily anticipated"?

[TimeZone]

You probably don't understand that a lot of people are employed in the area. I worked on technology that went into the #6 machine, and yeah, the top500 lists mean a lot to us. I've been waiting a long time for something I worked on to end up in the top 10.

TZ

Re:What I find interesting...

[flaming-opus]

I did some contract work at ILM several years ago, and know why this is. They don't use one big machine, but rather a bunch of medium sized clusters. This is for a very good reason. Weta has, thus far, worked on one big movie at a time, where all of their resources are dedicated to a single data set. ILM is constantly working on half a dozen moveis all at once.

In essence, they lease some amount of resources to a particular movie studio for some number of months. At the time they were doing this with row upon row of 32 processor SGIs, but they are probably using something else these days. Thus no spot on the top500 list. However, since they are in the business of making movies, I bet they don't really care.

Re:Important points of note

[hackstraw]

The VT cluster will probably never beat the EarthSim. Why? Because the interconnects....

The fact that the earth simulator has 130% more processors than vt's mac cluster, probably has nothing to do with it.

Public

[ManoMarks]

These are the top 500 that we know about. What do you bet the NSA (and whatever the Chinese and possibly the Russian equivalents are) has at least 1 that is faster than all of these?