[OT, LONG] The top 500 supercomputers

31st TOP500 List of World’s Most Powerful Supercomputers Topped by
World’s First Petaflop/s System
Sat, 2008-06-14 00:03 |

* june2008

MANNHEIM, Germany; BERKELEY, Calif. & KNOXVILLE, Tenn.—With the
publication of the latest edition of the TOP500 list of the world’s most
powerful supercomputers today (Wednesday, June 18), the global high
performance computing community has officially entered a new realm—a
supercomputer with a peak performance of more than 1 petaflop/s (one
quadrillion floating point operations per second).

The new No. 1 system, built by IBM for the U.S. Department of Energy’s
Los Alamos National Laboratory and and named “Roadrunner,” by LANL after
the state bird of New Mexico achieved performance of 1.026
petaflop/s—becoming the first supercomputer ever to reach this
milestone. At the same time, Roadrunner is also one of the most energy
efficient systems on the TOP500.

The 31st edition of the TOP500 list was released at the International
Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, Germany. Since 1993, the list has
been produced twice a year and is the most extensive survey of trends
and changes in the global supercomputing arena.

“Over the past few months, there were a number of rumors going around
about whether Roadrunner would be ready in time to make the list, as
well as whether other high-profile systems would submit performance
numbers,” said Erich Strohmaier, a computer scientist at Lawrence
Berkeley National Laboratory and a founding editor of the TOP500 list.
“So, as the reports came in during recent weeks, it’s been both exciting
and challenging to compile this edition.”

The Roadrunner system is based on the IBM QS22 blades which are built
with advanced versions of the processor in the Sony PlayStation 3,
displaces the reigning IBM BlueGene/L system at DOE’s Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory. Blue Gene/L, with a performance of 478.2 teraflop/s
(trillions of floating point operations per second) is now ranked No. 2
after holding the top position since November 2004.

Rounding out the top five positions, all of which are in the U.S., are
the new IBM BlueGene/P (450.3 teraflop/s) at DOE’s Argonne National
Laboratory, the new Sun SunBlade x6420 “Ranger” system (326 teraflop/s)
at the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas –
Austin, and the upgraded Cray XT4 “Jaguar” (205 teraflop/s) at DOE’s Oak
Ridge National Laboratory.

Among all systems, Intel continues to power an increasing number, with
Intel processors now found in 75 percent of the TOP500 supercomputers,
up from 70.8 percent of the 30th list released last November.

Other highlights from the latest list include:

* Quad-core processor based systems have taken over the TOP500
quite rapidly. Already 283 systems are using them. Two hundred three
systems are using dual-core processors, only eleven systems still use
single core processors, and three systems use IBMs advanced Sony
PlayStation 3 processor with 9 cores.
* The top industrial customer, at No. 10, is the French oil
company: Total Exploration Production.
* IBM held on to its lead in systems with 210 systems (42 percent)
over Hewlett Packard with 183 systems (36.6 percent). IBM had 232
systems (46.4 percent) six months ago, compared to HP with 166 systems
(33.2 percent).
* IBM remains the clear leader in the TOP500 list in performance
with 48 percent of installed total performance (up from 45), compared to
HP with 22.4 percent (down from 23.9). In the system category Dell, SGI
and Cray follow with 5.4 percent, 4.4 percent and 3.2 percent respectively.
* The last system on the list would have been listed at position
200 in the previous TOP500 just six months ago. This is the largest
turnover rate in the 16-year history of the TOP500 project.

For the first time, the TOP500 list will also provide energy efficiency
calculations for many of the computing systems and will continue
tracking them in consistent manner.

* Most energy efficient supercomputers are based on
o IBM QS22 Cell processor blades (up to 488 Mflop/s/Watt),
o IBM BlueGene/P systems (up to 376 Mflop/s/Watt)
* Intel Harpertown quad-core blades are catching up fast:
o IBM BladeCenter HS21with low-power processors (up to 265
Mflop/s/Watt)
o SGI Altix ICE 8200EX Xeon quad-core nodes, (up to 240
Mflop/s/Watt) ,
o Hewlett-Packard Cluster Platform 3000 BL2x220 with double
density blades (up to 227 Mflop/s/Watt)
* These systems are already ahead of BlueGene/L (up to 210
Mflop/s/Watt).

Rounding out the Top 10 systems are:

* The No. 6 system is the top system outside the U.S., installed in
Germany at the Forschungszentrum Juelich (FZJ). It is an IBM BlueGene/P
system and was measured at 180 Tflop/s.
* The No. 7 system is installed at a new center, the New Mexico
Computing Applications Center (NMCAC) in Rio Rancho, NM. It is built by
SGI and based on the Altix ICE 8200 model. It was measured at 133.2 Tflop/s.
* For the second time, India placed a system in the top10. The
Computational Research Laboratories, a wholly owned subsidiary of Tata
Sons Ltd. in Pune, India, installed a Hewlett-Packard Cluster Platform
3000 BL460c system. They integrated this system with their own
innovative routing technology and achieved a performance of 132.8
Tflop/s which was sufficient for No. 8.
* The No. 9 system is a new BlueGene/P system installed at the
Institut du Développement et des Ressources en Informatique Scientifique
(IDRIS) in France, which was measured at 112.5 Tflop/s.
* The last new system in the TOP10 – at No. 10 – is also an SGI
Altix ICE 8200 system. It is the biggest system installed at an
industrial customer, Total Exploration Production. It was ranked based
on a Linpack performance of 106.1 Tflop/s.

The U.S. is clearly the leading consumer of HPC systems with 257 of the
500 systems. The European share (184 systems – up from 149) is still
rising and is again larger then the Asian share (48 – down from 58 systems).

Dominant countries in Asia are Japan with 22 systems (up from 20), China
with 12 systems (up from 10), India with 6 systems (down from 9), and
Taiwan with 3 (down from 11).

In Europe, UK remains the No. 1 with 53 systems (48 six months ago).
Germany improved but is still in the No. 2 spot with 46 systems (31 six
months ago).

The TOP500 list is compiled by Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim,
Germany; Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of NERSC/Lawrence Berkeley
National Laboratory; and Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee,
Knoxville.

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Microsoft has a new server for these computers, Windows HPC Server 2008:

September 22, 2008, 9:13 am
Microsoft Migrates From Servers to Supercomputers
By Ashlee Vance

Once relegated to the realm of national laboratories, supercomputers
have started to move downstream. These days, any business with $25,000
to $100,000 to spare can buy a computing system capable of cranking
through very difficult tasks. And, in fact, more businesses than ever
have started to buy exactly these types of systems as competitive
pressure mounts to perform complex operations faster.
Enterprise Computing

With this in mind, Microsoft’s interest in what’s known as
high-performance computing (HPC) makes a lot of sense. The world’s
largest software maker this week released a new, specialized version of
its Windows operating system built to distribute tasks across large
groups of computers.

Called Windows HPC Server 2008, the operating system uses the same guts
as Microsoft’s new mainstream business operating system Windows Server
2008. It’s an update to an earlier supercomputer-flavored operating
system released a couple of years ago when Microsoft decided to enter
this part of the computing market.

While Microsoft dominates the desktop and has a vast presence in the
server market, it’s an also-ran in this segment for the largest
computers. Most of the top supercomputers run the open source Linux
operating system, while a number of other systems use specialized
operating systems made by the likes of I.B.M. and Sun Microsystems.

According to the market researcher IDC, the high-performance computing
market is a standout for business hardware. Over the last three years,
sales of HPC systems have grown 20 percent a year -– a rate
“considerably higher than that of the overall server market,” IDC said
in a recent report. In 2007, the HPC market accounted for more than $10
billion in sales, IDC said.

Microsoft remains more or less a blip in that overall market, although
it has made progress. Twice a year, a list goes out ranking the top 500
supercomputers on the planet. The most recent list, published in June,
showed Windows running on just 5 of those systems, while Linux ran on
427 systems. Microsoft, however, did manage to get one high spot, No.
23, which sits at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications
(NCSA).

“We went from really nowhere in this to advancing to” a top system, said
Kyril Faenov, the general manager of Microsoft’s HPC business.

More important to Microsoft are the business customers interested in
these types of computers.

Faster processors from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices have made
supercomputer-class machines affordable for businesses. Most often,
companies cobble together tens, hundreds and even thousands of servers
that use common microprocessors and aim that computing horsepower at one
task or a handful of tasks. Such groups of servers are known as clusters
and have largely replaced the hulking, expensive machines that once
dominated the market.

It’s now common for oil and gas, financial services, biotechnology,
media and manufacturing companies to run their own clusters, which
handle a wide range of computing problems that tend to share a couple of
main characteristics –- they spread well across numerous processors and
they deal with very large sets of data.

The rise of affordable supercomputers goes hand-in-hand with the
problems that can benefit from such machines. Consumer electronics
companies, for example, need to create more complex products with rich
media functions and have to model prototypes of these devices.
Meanwhile, oil and gas companies are fighting to get the most accurate
possible geological models for successful drill sites.

“What is driving this is the competition to get products out faster and
faster,” Mr. Faenov said.

Microsoft has tried to lend a hand to customers by making its HPC
operating system as easy to use as possible. In theory, this will let
more businesses already familiar with Microsoft’s software move into the
“business HPC” era.

Along those lines, Microsoft and the supercomputer specialist Cray
released a desktop system last week that starts at $25,000. The idea is
that engineers used to fighting for time on the large computing clusters
can now benefit from having their own supercharged deskside machine.

In addition, Microsoft has improved the ways people can start computing
jobs with HPC Server 2008 and has added a number of reporting functions
that describe how well the myriad components that make up a
supercomputer are performing.

Microsoft is scheduled to discuss the fresh bits in Windows HPC Server
2008 at the High Performance on Wall Street conference on Monday in New
York.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/0...upercomputers/