Since 1986 - Covering the Fastest Computers
in the World and the People Who Run Them
Visit additional Tabor Communication Publications
November 19, 2008
In a Photo Finish, Roadrunner Beats Jaguar
Last week's announcement of the upgraded "Jaguar" system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) had a lot of people, including yours truly, thinking that the Cray super would take the TOP500 crown this time around. It was not to be.
Last week, it was announced that Jaguar's extreme makeover would deliver a world record 1.6 peak petaflops. That would translate into a Linpack benchmark close to 1.3 petaflops, which would have easily beaten the slightly enhanced 1.1 petaflop Roadrunner at Los Alamos National Laboratory. As it turned out, the folks at ORNL ended up splitting the Jaguar into two separate Linpack submissions. The older Cray XT4 part yielded 205 teraflops and came in at number 8 on the new list; the new XT5 part took the number 2 spot with 1.06 petaflops -- a mere 3 percent less than the new Roadrunner.
Why the ORNL machine was split up is a bit of a mystery. One can surmise that ORNL and Cray didn't have time to perform a complete benchmark run before the TOP500 submission deadline. Supposedly it took 18 hours for a single Linpack run on the XT5 part of the system, so it might not have been worth the extra time to get a full clean measurement on the entire system.
All this has nothing to do with the Jaguar's real purpose. The compelling story for this machine will be how it is able to handle "big science" applications in the petascale realm, especially under the DOE's INCITE program. We can expect to see the some of most challenging codes in climate research, fusion, astrophysics, biology, atomic physics, chemistry, and nanoscience running on Jaguar over next few years. (Since Roadrunner lives at Los Alamos, we have to assume most of the cycles on that machine will be devoted to classified work for the nuclear weapons program.)
Following the one-two punch of Roadrunner and Jaguar, the next four machines on the list are each just under half a petaflop. That's a lot of computing power in those first six slots -- nearly 4 petaflops. To give you a sense of how top-heavy the TOP500 has become, the remaining 494 computers on the list represent just (!) 12.9 petaflops.
The U.S still dominates the TOP500 with 291 systems. In fact, the top 9 systems are all deployed in the U.S.; but of the next 20 systems on the list, only 7 are. France, in particular seems to be moving up fast, with four supercomputers in the top 30. The top non-U.S machine, at number 10, is the Chinese-built Dawning 5000A at the Shanghai Supercomputer Center, and is the largest system that is running the Windows HPC 2008 operating system.
As has been the case over the past couple of years, the turnover on the TOP500 was rather high this time around. More than half the systems on the June list -- 267 -- didn't survive the November cut. The machine in the 500 slot is now a 12.6 teraflop Dell cluster.
Posted by Michael Feldman - November 18, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Standard Time
Discussion
There are 0 discussion items posted.
|
Join the Discussion |
Sponsored Links
One of the first HPC providers installing a 4X NVIDIA Kepler K-20 cluster. Invites you to a free evaluation on Seneca’s NVIDIA K20 Kepler cluster, pre-loaded with AMBER, NAMD, LAMMPS
Webinar: Programming Heterogeneous X64+GPU Systems Using OpenACC
Join Michael Wolfe as he compares the advantages and costs of using both low-level models and the directive-based OpenACC model for programming accelerated heterogeneous systems. Registration is free.
High-Performance Computing in Action
Businesses that want to be on the cutting edge of their industries are increasingly turning to high-performance computing (HPC) solutions to handle complex compute processes and speed up their rate of innovation. Download this Executive Brief to see how businesses in energy, life sciences and entertainment put HPC solutions to work in their operations.
- Acer and Altair simplify cluster computing
- Receive Higher Application Performance with end-to-end 56GbE
- Memory Debugging Challenges in Parallel and Distributed Applications
- Visualize Historical Usage for Optimized Returns on HPC Investments
- The Accelerated Genomics Cloud $25,000 Giveaway
- White Paper: Building a Data-Intensive Cluster Supercomputer
- PGI 2013: OpenMP 1.5X faster than GCC, new GNU-compatible OpenACC C++ compiler, CUDA 5 and Tesla K20 support, and more.
- ClusterStor™ 1500 – High Performance Efficiency
RSS Feeds
Feeds by Topic
- Applications
- Developer Tools
- Interconnects
- Middleware
- Networks
- Processors
- Storage
- Systems
- Visualization
Feeds by Industry
Feeds by Content Type
- Features
- Blogs
- Short Takes
- Off the Wire
- Whitepapers
- Multimedia
- HPC Soundbite Podcasts
- HPCwire Job Bank
Subscribe to All Content
Michael Feldman
Michael Feldman is the editor of HPCwire.
Recent Comments
No Recent Blog Comments
Feature Articles
Exascale Advocates Stand on Nuclear Stockpiles
In quieter times, sounding the bell of funding big science with big systems tends to resonate further than when ears are already burning with sour economic and national security news. For exascale's future, however, the time could be ripe to instill some sense of urgency....
Read more...
NSF Forges Further Beyond FLOPs
In a recent solicitation, the NSF laid out needs for furthering its scientific and engineering infrastructure with new tools to go beyond top performance, Having already delivered systems like Stampede and Blue Waters, they're turning an eye to solving data-intensive challenges. We spoke with the agency's Irene Qualters and Barry Schneider about..
Read more...
CERN, Google Drive Future of Global Science Initiatives
Large-scale, worldwide scientific initiatives rely on some cloud-based system to both coordinate efforts and manage computational efforts at peak times that cannot be contained within the combined in-house HPC resources. Last week at Google I/O, Brookhaven National Lab’s Sergey Panitkin discussed the role of the Google Compute Engine in providing computational support to ATLAS, a detector of high-energy particles at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
Read more...
Short Takes
NASA Builds 'Climate in a Box'
May 23, 2013 |
The study of climate change is one of those scientific problems where it is almost essential to model the entire Earth to attain accurate results and make worthwhile predictions. In an attempt to make climate science more accessible to smaller research facilities, NASA introduced what they call ‘Climate in a Box,’ a system they note acts as a desktop supercomputer.
Read more...
Building Supercomputers with Raspberries
May 22, 2013 |
At some point in the not-too-distant future, building powerful, miniature computing systems will be considered a hobby for high schoolers, just as robotics or even Lego-building are today. That could be made possible through recent advancements made with the Raspberry Pi computers.
Read more...
Running Computational Fluid Dynamics in the Cloud
May 16, 2013 |
When it comes to cloud, long distances mean unacceptably high latencies. Researchers from the University of Bonn in Germany examined those latency issues of doing CFD modeling in the cloud by utilizing a common CFD and its utilization in HPC instance types including both CPU and GPU cores of Amazon EC2.
Read more...
Computing the Physics of Bubbles
May 15, 2013 |
Supercomputers at the Department of Energy’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) have worked on important computational problems such as collapse of the atomic state, the optimization of chemical catalysts, and now modeling popping bubbles.
Read more...
Sponsored Whitepapers
Best Practices in Big Data Storage
05/10/2013 | Cleversafe, Cray, DDN, NetApp, & Panasas | From Wall Street to Hollywood, drug discovery to homeland security, companies and organizations of all sizes and stripes are coming face to face with the challenges – and opportunities – afforded by Big Data. Before anyone can utilize these extraordinary data repositories, however, they must first harness and manage their data stores, and do so utilizing technologies that underscore affordability, security, and scalability.
Progress in Parallel: the Bull Parallel Programming Center
04/15/2013 | Bull | “50% of HPC users say their largest jobs scale to 120 cores or less.” How about yours? Are your codes ready to take advantage of today’s and tomorrow’s ultra-parallel HPC systems? Download this White Paper by Analysts Intersect360 Research to see what Bull and Intel’s Center for Excellence in Parallel Programming can do for your codes.
Sponsored Multimedia
SGI DMF ZeroWatt Disk Solution
In this demonstration of SGI DMF ZeroWatt disk solution, Dr. Eng Lim Goh, SGI CTO, discusses a function of SGI DMF software to reduce costs and power consumption in an exascale (Big Data) storage datacenter.
Cray CS300-AC Cluster Supercomputer Air Cooling Technology Video
The Cray CS300-AC cluster supercomputer offers energy efficient, air-cooled design based on modular, industry-standard platforms featuring the latest processor and network technologies and a wide range of datacenter cooling requirements.
Blogs by Topics
Blogs by Author
- James Reinders
- Gary Johnson
- Andrew Jones
- Tiffany Trader
- Addison Snell
- Nicole Hemsoth
- Charlie Catlett
- Sue Korn
- Michael Feldman
- Chris Willard
- Isaac Lopez
- Tom Tabor
- Cathy Davidson
- William Lu
- Michael Wolfe
- Dan Gatti
- Caroline Connor
HPC Blogroll
- Computing Research Policy Blog
- Interconnects
- Reed's Ruminations
- Scalability.org
- StorageMojo
- Sun HPC Watercooler
Featured Events
- June 13, 2013
- June 14, 2013
Think Beyond Plastics Conference
Berkeley, CA
United States
- June 16, 2013
- June 20, 2013
ISC'13
Leipzig,
Germany
.gif)
- June 17, 2013
- June 18, 2013
Forecast 2013
San Francisco, CA
United States
- June 20, 2013
- June 21, 2013
CIO North America
Marina Del Rey, CA
United States
- June 24, 2013
- June 25, 2013
The Trading Show Chicago
Chicago, IL
United States
- June 25, 2013
- June 26, 2013
TERATEC 2013 Forum
Paris,
France
