'Blue Waters' Supercomputer Lucky To Exist

Nerval's Lobster writes "One could argue that the University of Illinois' "Blue Waters" supercomputer, scheduled to officially open for business March 28, is lucky to be alive. The 11.6 petaflop supercomputer, commissioned by the University and the National Science Foundation (NSF), will rank in the upper echelon of the world's fastest machines—its compute power would place it third on the current list, just above Japan's K Computer. However, the system will not be submitted to the TOP500 list because of concerns with the way the list is calculated, officials said. University officials and the NSF are lucky to have a machine at all. That's due in part to IBM, which reportedly backed out of the contract when the company determined that it couldn't make a profit. The university then turned to Cray, which would have had to replace what was presumably a POWER or Xeon installation with the current mix of AMD CPUs and Nvidia GPU coprocessors. Allen Blatecky, director of NSF's Division of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure, told Fox that pulling the plug was a 'real possibility.' And Cray itself had to work to find the parts necessary for the supercomputer to begin at least trial operations in the fall of 2012."

Can't have it both ways..

[Junta]

because of concerns with the way the list is calculated

Read: because it won't look as nice as throwing the Rpeak of 11.6 Petaflops out there, and the ration of Rmax to Rpeak will look poor as well.

I know the Top500 is a BS, single dimensional metric. It is valid to call it out on that. However, to do so while also trumpeting '11.6 Petaflops' is disengenious since it is also a BS single dimensional metric that in many ways can be pulled completely out of ones ass, which is even worse than a measured value. HPC Challenge Benchmark has the noble goal of measuring the character of an HPC system in a more holistic manner, but no one pays as much attention to it. When occasionally a supercomputer installation does skip a Top500 submission, people tend not to think about that installation so much.

Of course, it's completely bizarre that placement in any such global list is a factor in purchasing and design at all. It really should be about the specific needs of the group funding it and how they are met, not some penis measuring contest.