New Top 10 supercomputer rankings

[Eug]

1) 36010 - BlueGene/L DD2 - 16384 0.7 GHz PowerPC 440
2) 35860 - Earth Simulator - 5120 NEC processors
3) 20530 - IBM eServer BladeCenter JS20 - 3564 2.2 GHz PowerPC 970 G5
4) 19940 - QsNetII Intel Tiger4 - 4096 Itanium 2 1.4 GHz
5) 19564 - NASA Project Columbia SGI Altix 3000 - 4032 Itanium 2 1.5 GHz
6) 13880 - ASCI Q - 8160 Alpha 1.25 GHz
7) 12250 - Virginia Tech Apple Xserve - 2200 2.3 GHz PowerPC 970 G5
8) 11680 - BlueGene/L DD1 - 8192 0.5 GHz PowerPC 440
9) 10310 - IBM eServer pSeries 655 - 2880 1.7 GHz POWER4+
10) 9819 - Dell PowerEdge 1750 - 2500 P4 Xeon 3.06

 

[high]

zZz

 

[Sunner]

One must say, those 970's are impressive in this respect, seems like people aren't kidding when they say AltiVec is good for vector processing.

 

[Eug]

Originally posted by: Sunner
One must say, those 970's are impressive in this respect, seems like people aren't kidding when they say AltiVec is good for vector processing.

AFAIK, it's all floating point. eg. The PPC 440 in BlueGene doesn't have an Altivec unit at all.

 

[Sunner]

Originally posted by: Eug

Originally posted by: Sunner
One must say, those 970's are impressive in this respect, seems like people aren't kidding when they say AltiVec is good for vector processing.

AFAIK, it's all floating point. eg. The PPC 440 in BlueGene doesn't have an Altivec unit at all.

Would depend on the application I guess, but the CPU's in the Earth Simulator(an SX-6 isn't it...?) are all specially designed vector processors for example.
I guess IBM took the approach they did to be able to squeeze that many CPU's into a relatively dense system.

 

[jspeicher]

:: looks in his closet to make sure his 40,000 Xeon CPUs are still working ::

 

[Eug]

AFAIK, it's all floating point. eg. The PPC 440 in BlueGene doesn't have an Altivec unit at all.

Would depend on the application I guess

The benchmark used for the Top 500 ranking is Linpack. (Not that I understand the article, because I'm a n00b at this stuff.)

n00b explanation of Linpack for people like me.

 

[thorin]

Ok stupid question is that first column of numbers MFLOPS? GFLOPS? TFLOPS?

Thorin

 

[BW86]

when is NASA's Space Exploration Simulator going to be complete?

 

[Sunner]

Originally posted by: Eug

AFAIK, it's all floating point. eg. The PPC 440 in BlueGene doesn't have an Altivec unit at all.

Would depend on the application I guess

The benchmark used for the Top 500 ranking is Linpack. (Not that I understand the article, because I'm a n00b at this stuff.)

n00b explanation of Linpack for people like me.

Seems like a job a vector processor would do very well to me, and hence AltiVec should help those 970's out quite well.

Thorin, it's GFLOPS.

 

[Eug]

Originally posted by: Sunner
Seems like a job a vector processor would do very well to me, and hence AltiVec should help those 970's out quite well.

Maybe, but what I was getting at was that the benchmark doesn't allow Altivec, AFAIK. So the numbers you're seeing are without any Altivec (or SSE2) boost.

 

[Eug]

Here is the new top 10 list. NASA has jumped into the lead, by a large margin, with 8000+ Itanium 2 CPUs in a bunch of SGI boxes.

BTW, on the list there are more than 10 entries, but that's because several of the entries are just the same supercomputer, benchmarked with less CPUs or whatever. These extra entries don't show up on the final list.

 

[Sunner]

Originally posted by: Eug

Originally posted by: Sunner
Seems like a job a vector processor would do very well to me, and hence AltiVec should help those 970's out quite well.

Maybe, but what I was getting at was that the benchmark doesn't allow Altivec, AFAIK. So the numbers you're seeing are without any Altivec (or SSE2) boost.

I didn't know they're not allowed to use CPU specific optimizations.
You learn something new every day.

Well, no, but once in a while

 

[dguy6789]

That is incorrect. Bluegene is more then 5 times as powerful as earth simulater. Blue gene has 360Teraflops, compared to like 35 of earth simulater, and not only this, blue gene takes up far less space and less electricity. Nasa cant touch bluegene.

 

[Azsen]

I think they're forgetting the NSA super computer that they use to crack all the encryption algorithms, but that would be ahh, classified.

 

[Sunner]

Originally posted by: dguy6789
That is incorrect. Bluegene is more then 5 times as powerful as earth simulater. Blue gene has 360Teraflops, compared to like 35 of earth simulater, and not only this, blue gene takes up far less space and less electricity. Nasa cant touch bluegene.

Except Blue Gene/L isn't finished, it's still under construction.

 

[dguy6789]

Originally posted by: Sunner

Originally posted by: dguy6789
That is incorrect. Bluegene is more then 5 times as powerful as earth simulater. Blue gene has 360Teraflops, compared to like 35 of earth simulater, and not only this, blue gene takes up far less space and less electricity. Nasa cant touch bluegene.

Except Blue Gene/L isn't finished, it's still under construction.

But its supposed to be finished before then end of this year.

 

[Sunner]

Originally posted by: dguy6789

Originally posted by: Sunner

Originally posted by: dguy6789
That is incorrect. Bluegene is more then 5 times as powerful as earth simulater. Blue gene has 360Teraflops, compared to like 35 of earth simulater, and not only this, blue gene takes up far less space and less electricity. Nasa cant touch bluegene.

Except Blue Gene/L isn't finished, it's still under construction.

But its supposed to be finished before then end of this year.

Well, when it's finnished, they'll submit numbers for it, for now, those are the highest numbers they've achieved, hence the list is correct.