Top 500 Supercomputer List Released 167
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."
Why the fuss about Earth Simulator? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Why the fuss about Earth Simulator? (Score:1)
Re:Why the fuss about Earth Simulator? (Score:1)
Or maybe it's the Greeks describing Zeus...
Re:Why the fuss about Earth Simulator? (Score:1)
Should we really feel so good about this list? Should we really feel so good that such a significant portion of American computational resources is for warfare and the design weapons of mass destruction?
Look at the other machines at the top of the list. Where do other countries place their computational resources?
Eric Salathe
Evidently.... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Evidently.... (Score:2)
GZ List in vanilla HTML [hashinclude.com] (Have mercy on my server too!)
Oh dear (Score:4, Funny)
Those computers will read that list and know which computers to connect to, to take over the world!!
Doesn't anyone read comics anymore ??
May $DEITY have mercy on us all.
Not comics... the Forbin Project (Score:3, Funny)
Those computers will read that list and know which computers to connect to, to take over the world!!
WARN
THERE IS ANOTHER SYSTEM
Imagine a... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Imagine a... (Score:1)
IBM's Blue Gene (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:IBM's Blue Gene (Score:5, Informative)
Blue Gene is an amazingly simple, and crafty design, with efficiency at its heart. I'm not sure that it will be as successful as the IBM marketing machine claims it will, but it's exciting none-the-less.
The trend in CPUs, over the last ten years or so, has been to maximally fill long, wide super-scalar pipelines. The Power4 has half a dozen execution units and a 15 stage pipeline, running at 1.7 ghz. To keep that full, one has to have exceptional branch prediction, huge caches, and superb compilers, and tons of memory bandwidth.
The Blue Gene approach is to have fewer, shallower, lower-clocked pipelines, but lots of CPUs. Their peak speed is a quarter of the top CPU designs, but their real speed is half of the big guns. Since they are using today's chip technology to implement yesterday's chip designs, they use little power, and are very inexpensive. Since IBM has cleverly integrated all the communications networks and memory controllers, you only need three components in the system: CPUs, RAM chips, and passive circuit boards - plastic and copper. (Yeah, I'm sure there is other stuff, but not much)
The design is not revolutionary, it's a fairly intuitive evolution of the Paragon, or the T3E. This sort of system may not be perfect for every task, but will excell at the sorts of tasks that already work well on big clusters. That, and it will likely be very cost effective.
Re:IBM's Blue Gene (Score:1)
And infiniband is even worse.
Re:IBM's Blue Gene (Score:1)
140C is quite hot... :-)
Patrick
Re:IBM's Blue Gene (Score:1)
What I find interesting... (Score:5, Insightful)
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... (Score:2, Insightful)
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:What I find interesting... (Score:1)
Re:What I find interesting... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What I find interesting... (Score:2)
Re:What I find interesting... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Sevenfold Increase in Opterons (Score:2, Funny)
How do they measure? (Score:5, Funny)
The link didn't work right now so I'll make a guess...
Test must at least include Q3, UT-2004 and 3DMark03, but since these are pretty powerful computers I guess they also use some sort of advanced custom built MineSweeper with like 10.000x10.000 grid playing field or something wild crazy stuff like that.
Maybe 400+ pages Word documents?
Final test is probably Halo for pc. Any fps score above 20 will result in a spot > 100 on the list.
Re:How do they measure? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:How do they measure? (Score:2)
Re:How do they measure? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:How do they measure? (Score:2, Interesting)
This is why the US government uses HPC challenge benchmark, in which Linpack is only one measure among eight.
Google cluster? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Google cluster? (Score:4, Interesting)
Google has an impressive cluster but it's optimized for storage and parallel page access.
I don't think that you could use google's cluster to compute 42 without distributing the work by hand over the different servers because it wasn't built to do calculations but to answer page requests distributed over the different units and to be able to access the most complete mirror of today's web
Re:Google cluster? (Score:1, Funny)
Oh yeah? ;^) [google.co.uk]
Re:Google cluster? (Score:1)
Re:Google cluster? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Google cluster? (Score:2)
at that node count interconnect speed and latency becomes crucial factor and from what i know about google they have 3-4 data centers and servers connected via commodity interconnect (1000/100).
from my understanding of linpack their setup just isn't suitable for such workload.
Re:Google cluster? (Score:1)
In research, there are huge grids that cannot be benchmarked, because those are co-financed, and facing the difficulties to determine who would get the credit for the whole grid, the best is to avoid it.
And the final reason could be that now that the manufacturers are leading a war on this lis
Google facts and figures (Score:3, Interesting)
that tells more about "the beast". So far, I just can tell that it is made of linux clusters, containing about 12500 nodes, because in case of clusters you are facing bi processors systems 98% of the time.
Here is the track, if someone wants to hunt the beast.
Re:Google cluster? (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
"heavily anticipated"? (Score:3)
Somebody needs a little perspective...
Re:"heavily anticipated"? (Score:5, Insightful)
TZ
Re:"heavily anticipated"? (Score:2)
Congratulations on getting your piece of the top ten.
Re:"heavily anticipated"? (Score:2)
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WWDC Power (Score:2, Interesting)
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Re:WWDC Power (Score:3, Interesting)
Assuming an average 1GHz per person, 4 FLOPS per cycle (assuming you could get Altivec working flat strap), 70,000 people turn up that could work out to be... ummm.... 280 teraflops.
You'd have yourself a Universe Simulator with that amount of power!
Re:WWDC Power (Score:2, Informative)
Linux clusters still rule (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Linux clusters still rule (Score:1, Informative)
on a side note the cluster that will control bluegene (yes, to control the big beast they are planning to use a cluster of machines, for example they will use db2 to store informations about the 64 thousands
Re:Linux clusters still rule (Score:3, Interesting)
you cluster together a bunch of monolithic kernels. At 8000 processors you aren't going to be able to use 1 monolithic kernel, so the distinction between a medium scalable OS like linux and a large scalable OS like solaris/irix is a bit of a moot point. 1000 OS images instead of 250? It's a nuisance either way.
Re:Linux clusters still rule (Score:2)
The important distinction for supercomputers is 'cluster' versus shared memory.
most powerful clusters? (Score:2)
Re:most powerful clusters? (Score:2)
in all practicality it's impossible to make computer that isn't a cluster of some sort that would make it to the list.
Re:most powerful clusters? (Score:1)
I hope they're not using... (Score:1, Funny)
I hope they're not using Linux. That's a LOT of SCO licenses...
Re:I hope they're not using... (Score:2)
My machine (Score:4, Funny)
I see my machine has not made it into the list. Ah well. Maybe next year...
Re:My machine (Score:2)
Supercomputer running the website. (Score:1, Redundant)
Re:Supercomputer running the website. (Score:1)
Re:Supercomputer running the website. (Score:2, Interesting)
Apple Xserve cluster is IBM too (Score:5, Interesting)
That's not to take anything away from Apple. Both Xserve and the G5 towers that came before them are a great design, reliable, run a great OS, yada yada yada. But the chips are IBM.
Re:Apple Xserve cluster is IBM too (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Apple Xserve cluster is IBM too (Score:2)
Re:Apple Xserve cluster is IBM too (Score:2)
Re:Apple Xserve cluster is IBM too (Score:1)
Re:Apple Xserve cluster is IBM too (Score:2)
I'm sure that whoever modded your post as flamebait did so because you added personal insult ("you idiot") for no reason whatsoever. You may find that your karma will increase (both on
The cluster isn't on the list, period.
No shit, Sherlock. It says as much in the story summary:
Th
Re:Apple Xserve cluster is IBM too (Score:1)
+ 65 for IBM (Score:5, Interesting)
In October, HP was impressive, because they filled the bottom of the list with Itanium based superdome: they ranked those all on the same bench figures, that means that those computers were not benchmarked by the customers but by HP. That was a good oportunity for IBM: each time they could put one of their computers on the list, they were sure to throw an HP one out of it, so increase the gap by a factor of 2 (+1 for IBM, -1 for HP) with their main rival.
So I am now wondering if this top500 list still means anything in term of performances and computing power, or is just a promoting tool, where manufacturers can conduct a war on market shares.
Unemployment Rate Goes Down (Score:2, Funny)
mirror site (Score:1, Informative)
Don't bother mentioning Intel (Score:2)
A look at the hardware shows Intel Corp. making big gains on its competitors with a total of 287 machines are based on Intel chips, up from 119 this time last year.
Re:Don't bother mentioning Intel (Score:2)
Important points of note (Score:5, Interesting)
2) Google's cluster is (probably) a much more distributed system, it would probably take a severe beating in trying to do the LinPack benchmarks that they use to rank the top500. The algorithm requires a lot of data passing, it probably doesn't excel at low latency or even high bandwidth (>16Gb/s) data passing. That's just an educated guess though, AFAIK that information is pretty well secreted. In raw processing power under one roof Google probably has it made, but since most problems (not all, read: *@home) in science and math require lots of data passing between nodes Google will probably get trounced in the top500.
Patrik
Re:Important points of note (Score:3, Insightful)
The fact that the earth simulator has 130% more processors than vt's mac cluster, probably has nothing to do with it.
Re:Important points of note (Score:1)
Patrik
Re:Important points of note (Score:2)
~3.5 times speedup for ~2.3 times the processors, it's not all in the # of processors.
Gee, perhaps that's because the earth simulator has vector processors, which perform quite well on the linpack benchmark, given a good vectorizing fortran compiler. Not to mention that linpack isn't _that_ demanding of bandwidth and latency, otherwise you wouldn't see all those clusters in the top ten. Or top 100 for that matter.
Re:Important points of note (Score:2)
Considering that they're not even trying to get to #1, that's a deep observation.
Re:Important points of note (Score:1)
A few things:
This is Myrinet, not Myranet.
Infiniband does not have lower latency than Myrinet, at least not at the MPI level. Using MX, I get 3.5us with Pallas with E cards, 4us with D cards, and there is no trick like polling only a few sources, or caching the memory registration.
MX is not completely finished, but I will release a beta version this week so you can reproduce the numbers.
Patrick
Re:Important points of note (Score:1)
http://lqcd.fnal.gov/ib/ (half way down the page)
Patrik
Re:Important points of note (Score:1)
There are a lot of thinks on paper with IB. The 2 last times I used tiny demo IB clusters that various vendors were evaluating, I saw 7.5us at the MPI, but I am very biaised too.
On Myrinet, 6.3 us is with GM, 3.5 us is with MX (my baby). Same hardware, differe
Sheesh (Score:5, Funny)
:-\
In other news, Car & Driver released their list of top ten coolest cars. The new Ford GT was not included because Bob had it in the garage for an oil change.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Sheesh (Score:2)
"Dang, supercomputers are still backordered at the Apple Store."
Re:Sheesh (Score:1)
China took more than 10 positions (Score:2)
Linpak Benchmark (Score:1)
My work (Score:1)
June 1994 (Score:4, Interesting)
Public (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Public (Score:2)
Over time secrets leak out. I've never heard of a goverment having more computing power than that commercially available. Maybe Moores law makes this impossible.
Think about whatever the fastest cluster is now in 18 months it's probably going to double. 18 months is shorter than the usual procurement cycle for goverment!
If there was some black op to produce goverment only HPCs where do they get their engineers? Somebody would have talked by now.
I've no doubt that the NSA is making good u
Re:Public (Score:2)
Unlikely. There's a reason Earth Simulator has been #1 for like 3 years now. You can't just throw more hardware at the problem. You have to throw money, and design into it. Even secretive organizations like the NSA have their technical and even monetary limits.
These secretive organizations used to probably have the fastes
Re:Public (Score:2)
Press Release says 30 for AMD , top 500 says 34? (Score:2)
The odd thing is that in the AMD press release they note 30 AMD chips, but the top 500 site itself says 34 AMD processors [top500.org]. I wonder what the story is on the other 4.
Paul Sundling
Ethernet apparently sucks for this. (Score:1)
Yeah, that's a difference of 380 processors, fairly close to 30%....... and Rmax is 2026 for all of them.
Sure, this is one benchmark only, but damn, that must look bad when your extra 380 procs doesn't get any improvement.
CPU Count (Score:1)
Re:Jesus (Score:1, Insightful)
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:Jesus (Score:1)
Re:Jesus (Score:1)
Re:Shrinkage? (Score:2)
ok I'll do it, karma to burn (Score:1)