Posted on 11/13/2018 3:25:08 AM PST by ShadowAce
The semi-annual Top500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers was released on Nov. 12, with the U.S holding down the top two spots overall.
The IBM POWER9 based Summit system has retained its crown that it first achieved in the June 2018 ranking. Summit is installed at the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory and now has performance of 143.5 petaflops per second, up from the 122.3 petaflops the system had when it first came online.
The IBM POWER9 Sierra system also improved over the last six months and is now the second most powerful system on the plant at 94.6 petaflops, up from 71.6 petfalops six months ago.
Prior to Summit and Sierra coming online, the most power supercomputer in the U.S. was the Cray XK7 Titan, which is also at Oak Ridge National Lab. Titan now has 17.6 petaflops of power, making it the ninth most power system in the world today.
Though China doesn't hold the top spot on the list, it now has more supercomputers than any other other nation with 227. In contrast, there are now only 109 systems on the Top500 list that are located in the U.S., which is an all-time low.
That said, thanks to the enormous power of Summit and Sierra at the top, the U.S. is home to 38 percent of the total aggregate supercomputing power on the top500 list, while China's systems account for 31 percent.
The vendors supplying the hardware behind the Top500 supecomputers are also somewhat mixed. While IBM dominates the top of the list with Sierra and Summit, overall Lenovo is the leader in terms of total systems with 117.
"Last year, we set a goal to become the worlds largest provider of TOP500 computing systems by 2020. We have reached that goal two years ahead of our original plan, Kirk Skaugen, President of Lenovo Data Center Group, wrote in a statement. "We are motivated every day by the scientists and their groundbreaking research as we work together to solve humanitys greatest challenges."
Another vendor that is seeing its technology more widely used than every before is NVIDIA. 127 of the top 500 system now have an NVIDIA GPU accelerator, up from 86 in 2017.
"With the end of Moore's Law, a new HPC market has emerged, fuelled by new AI and machine learning workloads," Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, wrote in a statement. "These rely as never before on our high performance, highly efficient GPU platform to provide the power required to address the most challenging problems in science and society."
So, you think we should have hardware platforms (multi socket, NUMA systems) and keep the drivers and OS implementations secret? How is this tenable as a business plan for any hardware vendor? NUMA is far from supercomputer specific (many cloud and enterprise systems in use). Are you proposing to export control the OS? Once the hardware is there, a team of trained OS engineers could bring up new kernel components, regardless.
You dont know that. Do you even know what the protocol is for classifying information or technology? How do you know its being properly implemented, and audited, at every location? Bottom line, you cant know. Ever even had basic access to classified information? Or just making things up as you go?
yes
Huh? Who cares what the hardware vendors want in this situation. The goal of our government should have been to provide us the best supercomputers possible, while limiting the ability of potential adversaries for obtaining them. And yes, bills were proposed to block this type of technology, but were not approved into law. Same time as all our factories left for overseas. What did we get in return? A promise of 49% max ownership in some new partnership with the Chinese government, so long as we gave all the technology away.
Yeah, even John McAfee is saying that during his more lucid moments.
Drive encryption ala McAfee is crap.
I’ve been stuck with deploying it and the agents half work and encrypt or they go up to two weeks and then finally run.
McAfee defies any attempt I can come up with to force it to run that I can find.
It also freezes external USB on many of my windows 10 boxes until I go into the BIOS.
Windows 7 seems a lot more tolerant.
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