Earth Simulator, G5 Cluster Drop In 'Top 500' List 343
daveschroeder writes "The November Top 500 supercomputer list has been published at SC2004. Topping the charts is IBM and the US Department of Energy's 'BlueGene/L DD2' beta system, at 70.72 TFlops, followed by NASA's 'Columbia' at 51.87.TFlops. For the first time in several publications of this list, Japan's Earth Simulator is no longer in the number one slot, falling to third. Virginia Tech's 'System X' Xserve G5 cluster, while 20% faster than the original cluster that debuted at number 3 last November, has fallen to number 7 due to the new entries, but remains the fastest supercomputer at an academic institution. Here's an excellent cost comparison (Google cache) of the top machines ('System X' is significantly cheaper than anything else in the top 20, not to mention cheaper than many things far below it in performance)."
VA Tech Supercomputer (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Power architecture does well (Score:5, Informative)
CPU benchmarks (Score:4, Informative)
AMD is beating the crap out of Intel.
Don't get carried away with LINPACK flops/cost! (Score:5, Informative)
"Another example is PNNL's 1936 processor Itanium2 cluster: 3.5Tflops less performance than System X, for $25 million"
What is not captured by the LINPACK scores is that PNNL's machine will absolutely spank the BigMac cluster at what the PNNL machine is intended for: running computational chemistry codes such as NWChem. A lot of the cash for the PNNL machine went into large memories and fast I/O that simply does not show up in the LINPACK benchmark. Furthermore, there are a lot of very high-profile scientific publications that have come out of the computational chemistry abilities of the PNNL machine. That's something else extremely important that doesn't show up in the rankings.
There are a lot of similar examples, but the PNNL one is one that I know something about, so I chose it. Basically, I'm saying to not read too much into those cost comparisons. It really is comparing Apples to oranges... er, HPs in this case. =)
Re:Power architecture does well (Score:5, Informative)
Re:power costs? (Score:5, Informative)
Several of the researchers at Virginia Tech have referred to this in various news stories numerous times - one estimate was over two times less power than comparable systems.
Re:VA Tech Supercomputer (Score:5, Informative)
Re:CPU benchmarks (Score:2, Informative)
AMD Athlon (TM) 64 FX-55 1 core, 1 chip, 1 core/chip 1750 1854
Here is the best intel:
3.4 GHz, Pentium 4 Proce 1 core, 1 chip, 1 core/chip with HT Technology enabled 1667 1705
Here are the best specfp numbers for AMD:
AMD Athlon (TM) 64 FX-55 1 core, 1 chip, 1 core/chip 1741 1782
Which just edges out the best Pentium
3.6GHz Xeon) 1 core, 1 chip, 1 core/chip 1700 1721
But gets beaten by a low end I2
1300 MHz, Itanium 2 1 1808 1808
Also by a Fujitsu SPARC
PRIMEPOWER900 (1890MHz) 1 core, 1 chip, 1 core/chip 1510 1803
Gets trounced by the second-best I2 available
1500 MHz, Itanium 2 1 2161 2161
And gets demolished by the top end POWER5
1900 MHz, 1 CPU 1 core, 1 chip, 2 cores/chip (SMT off) 2576 2702
Re:EARTH TO MAC ZEALOTS: (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Pizza arguments (Score:4, Informative)
-Don.
Re:Pizza arguments (Score:5, Informative)
We're going to consider the worst-case scenario, under which we have a 100% load, year round, on all 1100 nodes. That gives us a power consumption of 385kW and 1320kBTU/h of heat generation.
Now, we need to get rid of that heat, and that's going to require a lot of power. My research indicates up to 300kW may be required, but that's a high number and actual requirements may be lower.
So, here we are, with 685kW required for power and cooling. That means a 6000MW/h a year.
Now, the cost of power is high, since you need to amortize and maintain the UPS equipment and the generators. We'll use a figure of 0.15$/kW/h, or 150$/MW/h. Very generous.
So here we are. The absolute worst case for power and cooling. Full load, year round, expensive cooling, overpriced power and amortized UPS and generators.
900 000$/yr. Below a million. It's not that bad, is it ? The real cost is likely below a half-million.
As for the rest, well, how much pizza is really required to entice graduate students and professors to work on that machine ?
Re:Pizza arguments (Score:1, Informative)
I'm not trying to take any thing away from the VT cluster, but the prices quoted on the earth sim always include the total cost of the specifically designed, earthquake proof building and everything associated with the project, whereas prices for the VT cluster negate this and only count the hardware VT had to pay for - none of the freebies.
How is it one can get a dell for less than an apple but mysteriously as soon as it becomes a cluster (using the same interconnect) the G5 is cheaper? apples to apples....
#4 is also academic (Score:3, Informative)
I work at UPC and there has been a lot of hype here for machine #4, which is (or is going to be) a >4500 PPC970s machine running linux (nice work, ibm). I disagree with the claim that the Virgina Tech cluster is the first academic supercomputer. As far as I'm concerned the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC) is also an academic institution.
Anyway. we now got europe's fastest supercomputer. That's what matters. ha!
Re:Hmm (Score:4, Informative)
More Information here. [wikipedia.org]
Re:CPU benchmarks (Score:4, Informative)
Virginia fastest academic? (Score:3, Informative)
Beg to differ: #4 is about 5 mins from home (by bus), in the northern campus of universitat politècnica de catalunya. And, yes, part of the institution, not some loaned space or something. Mind you, one wishes Spanish Universities involved their students a tenth as much. S-2.
Coup? Cuckoo! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:EARTH TO MAC ZEALOTS: (Score:3, Informative)
Christ, clusters are not the end all and be all of high performance computing systems.
I guess I don't get the arugment because many of the other entries are clusters and not not single image either. Of course, given OS and architecture differences, all the supercomputers may perform differently in real world applications than the benchmark tests. The point is that System X was built using off-the-shelf components at a fraction of the cost of comparable systems. The entry right above System X is the US Army cluster of Apples (Mach 5). Obviously Apple is starting to be considered for high end computing.
In your face, Amiga! In your face! :)
Re:Pizza arguments (Score:5, Informative)
Re:need? (Score:4, Informative)