The Top 10 Supercomputers, Illustrated 68
1sockchuck writes "The twice-a-year list of the Top 500 supercomputers documents the most powerful systems on the planet. Many of these supercomputers are striking not just for their processing power, but for their design and appearance as well. Here's a visual guide to the top finishers in the latest Top 500 list, which was released this week at the SC11 conference."
Visual guide? (Score:3, Funny)
What a let down, I was hoping to see a visual guide to these, you know something like how many small European countries would need to be covered in Cray 1's to equal there power!
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yeah, i too expected graphs and graphics comparing performance, memory, etc. not small un-zoomable pictures.
Geek Porn at its Finest (Score:1, Funny)
At last! Something to run Crysis at an acceptable frame rate!
Acceptable Frame Rate (Score:1, Troll)
At last! Something to run Crysis at an acceptable frame rate!
At last! Something to run Firefox at an acceptable frame rate!
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Ok ok something that will run a flash version of Crysis running off of firefox at an acceptable frame rate.
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Will that do?
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Something to run slashdots unoptimised JavaScript at an acceptable frame rate!
Nice rack. (Score:3)
Re:Nice rack. (Score:5, Insightful)
Looking at some photograph ,I see your point - something plain or just black with some blinkenlighten like the Connection Machine would have been enough.
Though, when you buy a system like that, the cost isn't the hardware, it's the field and support engineers available 24/7, customer support, projects and power consumption that are the big costs. There used to be a joke, "Buy a super-computer from us, and we'll throw the building in for free".
Modern day supercomputer systems use a standardized rack frame system and intercommunication fabric so that the oldest and slowest nodes can be pulled out, while the newest and fastest ones can be slotted in straight away. That removes the overhead of having to construct a new building, power supply system, air conditioning and network infrastructure just to do a simple upgrade.
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Though, when you buy a system like that, the cost isn't the hardware, it's the field and support engineers available 24/7, customer support, projects and power consumption that are the big costs. There used to be a joke, "Buy a super-computer from us, and we'll throw the building in for free"
Wrong. Actually, current systems (e.g. Blue Waters) easily cost $200 mio. to procure, and that is just the hardware and support for 1 year, excluding staff, power etc.
Modern day supercomputer systems use a standardized rack frame system and intercommunication fabric so that the oldest and slowest nodes can be pulled out, while the newest and fastest ones can be slotted in straight away. That removes the overhead of having to construct a new building, power supply system, air conditioning and network infrastructure just to do a simple upgrade.
Sorry, but wrong again. Modern supercomputers quite often use custom interconnects (e.g. Cray's Seastar or Gemini or Fujitsu's Tofu). Also, as K and Jaguar show, the cooling solutions are commonly custom, too. This is because node density is growing exponentially and off-the-shelf interconnects and cooling can't keep up with this.
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Thanks for that info. Maybe different supercomputer centers have different purchasing requirements, especially those that can't expand space or have be really cost-effective.
Guess things are just remaining as they are. That's why they had/have custom buildings - they would house the custom cooling system, custom interconnects as well as power supplies as well as offices for the engineers.
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They would be cheaper obviously but when you're spending millions on the systems themselves, you might as well throw in a few bucks extra to make the container look nice.
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Mare Nostrum [www.bsc.es] is comparatively small; but the 'glass pod full of ebon supercomputer modules seemingly suspended in a historic Spanish chapel' effect is pretty neat...
Every supercomputer should look nice . . . (Score:3, Funny)
Supercomputer seller: "What do you want in your supercomputer?"
Supercomputer buyer: "640K petaflop/s, Intel Gargantuaium nodes, POWER9 nodes, SPARC and Kindle nodes . . . "
Supercomputer seller: "Anything else . . . ?"
Supercomputer buyer: " . . . a shrubbery! One that looks nice . . . and not too expensive . . . "
Supercomputer seller: "Um . . . okay . . . "
Supercomputer buyer: ". . . and . . . another shrubbery . . . only a bit higher, so we get the two level effect, with a path down the middle for the service technician to walk along . . . "
Supercomputer seller: "Your supercomputer shall be the fastest in the world . . . for a few weeks, anyway . . . and it will look nice!"
What if Apple built a supercomputer? Those accessories would cost a fortune, but you could really flaunt them to the supercomputing community.
Re:Every supercomputer should look nice . . . (Score:5, Funny)
The entire building is a plastic white egg, there's a power button, a really big plug, 1 Ethernet jack, 1 usb port and several proprietary ports that no one but Apple uses. The preferred interface is a small touchscreen kiosk carefully hidden with tasteful landscaping.
There are no user-serviceable parts inside, opening the shell voids the warranty. What few upgrade options available when ordering will have exorbitant mark up and it will be slightly slower and a lot more expensive than most of its competitors. If anything breaks the recommended solution is to demolish it on site and order a new one.
Re:Every supercomputer should look nice . . . (Score:5, Informative)
Way back in '03, Virginia Tech built a cluster of 1,100 Mac G5's. It came in at #3 on the Top 500 list that year, and at $5.2M, it was a fraction of the cost of the next cheapest supercomputer in the top ten. And it was assembled by students in 3 weeks, using stock G5 towers fitted with InfiniBand cards.
It was later upgraded to G5 xServe boxes, and as of 2008, was still ranked 281 on the Top 500 list [top500.org].
Here's a short promo film that VT produced: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLujLtgBJC0 [youtube.com]
You've seen Apple's new campus design, have you? (Score:2)
The "plastic white egg" is a good first-order approximation of Apple's design for their new campus [techcrunch.com], which they'll be building at the old HP facility off Tantau Ave. in Cupertino. Well, fried egg, anyway, since there's a hole in the center...
Re:Every supercomputer should look nice . . . (Score:5, Insightful)
Well supercomputers tend to do look nice. If you are going to pay millions of dollars on a computer it better look pretty darn cool to impress the board of directors who approved it.
I use to work with a sales man who worked for Cray. Those old supercomputers with all those blinking lights knobs and buttons were there just to make the computer look impressive. They were not overly functional. Companies who buy these expensive computers would flaunt them and have them quite visible in their organization. Not just stuck in a back room.
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A picture of the Cray 1, for reference: Computer furniture [wikimedia.org].
Imagine a beowulf... (Score:5, Funny)
adventure game utilising the combined resources of these machines.
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I think the top botnets already have that amount of resources. Although their interconnect is obviously far slower.
*imagines a "supercomputer" with pigeon "interconnects"* ;)
Appearance? (Score:1)
All I saw were boxes with fancy paint jobs - and some not so fancy. What's the big deal?The Crays at least were tubular with a seat around them - like a bus or train station bench. Come on! How a spherical super computer? That would have the shortest paths between sub sections, too!
Or something out of Fuller's designs?
Boxes?!? Geeze! Get some imagination!
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Most supercomputers have changed to a distributive design those round designs means you cannot cram more hardware in an area meaning a longer bus connection per node.
Re:Phooey! (Score:4, Funny)
Yes! Show us the racks!
Wait, we were talking about the car show girls, right?
You know what would be nice? (Score:5, Funny)
A Top500 site where Petaflop count takes second place to aesthetic appeal.
Let's have Hypercubes, spheres, ultraflats, invisibles, ultraquiets, computers-as-furniture, computers-as-art, cyberpunk, retro; let your imagination run riot.
Just remember, it was my idea [freeforums.org].
Re:You know what would be nice? (Score:4, Insightful)
What's with the glam? (Score:5, Insightful)
When did the Top500 become a competition to see who could paint the prettiest picture on the side of a rack alleyway. I clicked the link expecting to see cables, guts, sweet AC units, and other nerd porn.
Instead I got something designed by a marketing department and in some cases just graphical rendering.
Nerd pleasing fail!
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For that matter, I'd paint the outside so that it looks like a real sci-fi super computer, tape reels and all. As long as someone says "man that looks complicated" it's mission accomplished. That's why you pay the big bucks right?
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How far we've come! (Score:4, Interesting)
The first top 500 list was published in June 1993 [top500.org]. The fastest computer on that list was a CM-5/1024 made by Thinking Machines Corporation. It was rated at: 59.70 Rmax(GFs) and 131.00 Rpeak(GFs).
Last place on that first top 500 list [top500.org] (scroll down) was held by a VP-200 made by Fujitsu/SNI which had 1 core and was rated at 0.422 Rmax(GFs) and 0.533 Rpeak(GFs).
I've heard the expression about carrying a supercomputer in your pocket - how close are we? I'd expect most of the latest Android/iPhone/smartphones can beat that last-place finisher from 1993. I'm doubtful that any of these devices could beat that first place finisher, but I suspect desktops (especially with GPUs) should be there by now. If you're are interested, you can get the software from here [top500.org].
Any takers? How does YOUR system compare?
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An Intel i5-2500K will push 50-60 GFLOPS. Over a hundred with overclocking, optimal memory settings, optimized software etc.
A modern graphics card can do over 1 TFLOPS if the workload is suitable for parallel processing.
So yes, you've got a supercomputer on your desktop. Probably even in your pocket.
Good question (Score:5, Informative)
The Tegra 3 chip that's showing up in phones this spring and Transformer Prime tablet now is about 7.2 GFLOPs [anandtech.com]. That's more than enough to be top 10 in 1993. Current ARM architectures might go all the way up to fast enough to take that number one spot in reference sample designs now but they consume too much power to go in your pocket on retail shelves as yet. Maybe in a year or two.
Mali T658 [hothardware.com] and PowerVR [imgtec.com] are two to watch here. Mali is supposed to go up to 350 GFLOPs. It still amazes me that in 1993 that machine cost about $70 million [chrisvernon.co.uk] in today's money and you can almost match it today for under $500.
This Is... (Score:1)
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huge gap (Score:2)
isn't it weird that there's such a huge difference between #1 and #2?
#1 K computer --> 705k cores, 1,410,048 Gb memory, 11,280,384 Rpeak(GFs)
#2 Tianhe-1A --> 186k cores, 229,376 Gb memory, 4,701,000 Rpeak(GFs)
K has ~6x the memory, ~6x the cores, and ~3x the Rpeak of Tianhe!
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what is 'texa-pan'?
Two points... (Score:1)
2) The real #1 is still the human brain.
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2) The real #1 is still the human brain.
Somehow I doubt that the human brain can beat these system in a Linpack benchmark.
Top 500 progress (Score:3)
publically acknolwedged systems (Score:4, Interesting)
the NSA has always been at the forefront of supercomputing, and it has always been incredibly secretive about it.
who knows about other nations intelligence agencies
Believe it when I see it (Score:2, Interesting)
the NSA has always been at the forefront of supercomputing, and it has always been incredibly secretive about it.
who knows about other nations intelligence agencies
Until the day arrives when the NSA declassifies some of the super-powerful technology it's supposed to always have, my bet is that they only have slightly evolved versions of what you see here.
The NSA has no processor foundries. They have no manufacturing plants. They don't have chip designers on staff (or, at least, not very many.) The amount of money they'd have to pay to get custom super-parts developed is dwarfed by the billions and billions spent to improve commodity architectures. There's just no way
citation needed (Score:5, Interesting)
according to James Bamford's books, especially the last two, they actually did have a chip foundry, they have been at the top of several supercomputer programs, and they are the only reason that CRAY survived in a capitalist economy where massive supercomputing R&D doesn't have a quick ROI.
we don't know what they have today. but we know what they had in the past, vs what everyone thought was going on in the past. and what everyone thought was wrong.
"illustrated" *yawn* (Score:2)
So we get to see a room full of racks.. Oh, some painted the racks pretty colors.. *yawn*
Sure, their raw power is impressive, but pictures of server racks?