I was a member of the team that installed #17 at ARL this year.
Posted on 06/27/2007 8:09:14 AM PDT by ShadowAce
Call it "supercomputing smackdown." Today, at the International Supercomputing Conference 2007 (ISC07) in Dresden, Germany, the Top500 group announced its latest list of the top 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world.
To say it's a competitive list would be an understatement and few of the players can hold top spots long without constant improvements. With a few exceptions, this June's list has seen a reshuffling since the last list was published last November.
If there is such a thing as a winner in such a competition, however, that would be IBM (Quote). Just as last November – the top 500 list is recompiled every six months – Big Blue held the top spot, with its Blue Gene/L - eServer Blue Gene Solution. In fact, IBM has taken that top spot four times running with the system deployed by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).
"The Blue Gene/L System development by IBM and DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and installed at DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif., claimed the No. 1 spot," the Top500 group announced Wednesday.
That system achieved a blazing benchmark performance of 280.6 TFlops ("teraflops" or trillions of floating point operations per second) running what's called the Linpack benchmark. (For those who are not mathematically challenged, the Top500 group says the point of the Linpack benchmark is "to solve a dense system of linear equations.")
Interestingly, IBM's performance with the Power-based Blue Gene/L System was identical to its score in November 2006 and in November 2005. (IBM says the system's theoretical performance is 360 TFlops.)
Additionally, however, three other eServer Blue Gene systems made the top ten – last November, IBM only had two of the systems on the list. A fifth IBM system, a BladeCenter JS21 cluster system located at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center in Spain, and also Power-based, came in at number 9, down from the number 5 spot last November.
If that weren't enough, a sixth IBM system, an eServer pSeries p5 575, also made the top ten.
Despite such a strong showing, however, Big Blue doesn't completely dominate. Neither is it the only company whose supercomputers turned in teraflop performances.
Notably, Cray (Quote) supercomputers, powered by AMD processors, hold the number two and three spots on the new list. Both beat the 100 TFlop barrier with more than 101 TFlops apiece. Cray held the number two and ten spots last time.
Intel (Quote) chips are also represented in the top ten supercomputing sites with systems from Dell (Quote) in eighth place and SGI (Quote) at ten. Bumped from June 2007's top ten were Bull SA and NEC/Sun.
Begun in 1993, this is the 29th Top500 list to be published. A lot has changed since then. As a matter of fact much has changed in just the last six months.
"The performance needed to make it onto the list increased to 4.005 TFlops, compared to 2.737 TFlop/s six months ago, [and] the system ranked [at] 500 on the current list would have held position number 216 only six months ago .... the largest turnover rate between lists in the Top500 project’s 15-year history," the Top500 group's statement said.
Trend-wise, despite having only two in the top ten, Intel-based systems continued to gain ground as the predominant high performance computing (HPC) processor, with nearly 58 percent share – 289 out of 500. That's up from 52.5 percent last time.
AMD (Quote) came in second with 21 percent, a decline from 22.6 percent in November, while IBM Power-based systems represent 17 percent, or 85 systems, down from 18.6 percent six months ago. Dual core processors, clusters, and Gigabit Ethernet all dominate, although InfiniBand usage is growing for system interconnections.
The U.S. is home to 281 of the 500 systems on the latest list, and European sites have grown to 127 systems (a jump from 95), while Asian sites dropped to 72 (a decline from 79). Of those, Japan has 23 and China has 13 of the Top500 systems. The UK currently has the most in Europe -- 43 systems -- and Germany is second with 24.
One significant indicator of how dynamic the HPC/supercomputing market is: "The average age of a system in the Top500 list is only 1 year and 2 months," the group said. Also worthy of note, HP (Quote) systems did not rank in the top 50, while IBM systems comprise 46 percent of the top 50.
I was a member of the team that installed #17 at ARL this year.
Sun says they expect to beat IBM with a 1.7 petaflop computer, soon to be released:
http://www.betanews.com/article/Sun_We_Can_Build_a_Faster_Supercomputer_Than_IBM/1182889189
Of course it’s not officially out yet, and we haven’t seen what IBM will do next.
Something a bit awkward sounding about “petaflop” to my ear.
Wow. Looking back 10 years, #1 had just topped one teraflop.
Wow! It seems like yesterday when the 1 teraflop ceiling was shattered - now it’s over 280! Just staggering to contemplate. What I find even more astonishing is the statement, “The average age of a system in the Top500 list is only 1 year and 2 months.”
Is it possible the capacity limit is growing that rapidly or are these units just suffering a proportionally short life span?
I am excited by the rapid increase in capacity and performance and am looking forward to the day when AI systems become smarter than us despite their linear limitations. By then, I hope, we will have the means of linking our “holistic” brains with theirs and get the best of both worlds ...
We have a few WinTel (Windows/Intel) servers that run a several non mission critical apps and they require manpower just to keep them running. With our IBM System i we focus on the business of the Company not just keeping a system available.
What, so we can scan through billions of hours of
network programming???
Does it come with Windows Vista?
Yeah--MS actually has a machine on this list as well--#106, I think. I wonder how well it runs in comparison to the other machines on the list.
BUMP!
Congrats. I'll bet that was interesting work.
How many of the top 500 are some variant of Unix, and how many are some version of windows?
499 are *nix, with 1 windows machines (#106, I think)
Wow, they went up since the last time I remember looking, when they had one cluster down in the 300s. IIRC, it was more expensive than the Virginia Tech Apple system in the Top 10.
Well, according to me 13-year old, he’s smarter than me. Also, if I recall correctly, I believed I was smarter than my father when I was a teenager. So there! lol!
Im guessing worse than 105 and better than 107 ;)
LOL! Of course. But I was thinking more along the lines of reliability and effort rather than raw speed. :)
I know just thought I would poke a little fun at it..
I just looked it up. There are two Windows Compute Cluster systems. I found the one at 106 -- and a client's not even using it! It's a Microsoft project, probably for testing and for publicity.
The other is at 193, in Japan. It's listed in the statistics and spreadsheet as running Windows, but the page itself shows Linux as the OS. I wonder what's going on there.
BTW, nice to see the Virginia Tech Apple cluster is still in the Top 100 after three years. They're getting a lot of mileage out of that relatively inexpensive investment.
Not really, depending on how you define intelligence. All we have to do is program a very powerful computer to be able to truly learn things on its own, reason, make connections. After that the speed at which it can learn could have it surpassing us in intelligence. It's like a gardener doesn't have to create a whole rose bush, he just has to plant the seed.
We would learn a lot of cool things before they took over.
Where I can't see them surpassing us is in creativity and insight, which is where some of our greatest advances come from. The sci-fi computer-based society would probably stagnate when it's collected all the data it could, made all the inferences and connections it could, but doesn't have the creative spark to be able to advance further.
And thus we take over again after we surpass them due to creative advances.
And then we will be stupid enough to build another intelligent machine using our new knowledge, and it all starts over again. We never could learn from history. Just look at all the people espousing communism these days.
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