IBM Still Leads Top 500 Supercomputers
Yesterday, amid all the news emerging from the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, IBM claimed it had already developed a new BlueGene model that had surpassed the one petaflop barrier - one quadrillion sustained operations per second. But it may be another five months before that fact is verified by the University of Mannheim, which today recorded the 65,536 x2-core BlueGene/L as holding the lead in its Top 500 Supercomputers list, with an unchanged rating of 280,600 gigaflops per second.
During that time, others are seeking to beat IBM to the one petaflop milestone, including Sun as BetaNews reported yesterday. In the meantime, the pecking order among the world's fastest processing clusters hasn't changed much.
The big winner in today's list appears to be the Oak Ridge National Laboratories, which upgraded its Cray XT3 to an XT4, and in so doing catapulted last November's #12 machine up into the #2 spot, with a rating of 101,700. That figure just barely bumps the former #2, a Cray Red Storm built by Sandia National Laboratories at 101,400, down one peg; but it also gives AMD Opteron processors two of the top three positions.
Twice each year, the rankings of 500 of the world's supercomputers are assessed by the University of Mannheim in association with Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Their figures are then sorted by tested clusters' maximal observed peak performance, in gigaflops (GFlops, or billions of floating-point operations per second). This performance is called the "Rmax rating," although Mannheim does publish theoretical mean performance as a comparison.
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The winner, and still champion: IBM's BlueGene/L, the 2,500-square-foot colossus built for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories by Watson Research Center. (Courtesy IBM) |
Bragging rights are what the Top 500 list is all about. To that end, Intel may feel a little sting, with its fastest x86 processor-based supercomputer knocked down to #8 - a Dell PowerEdge 1955 system built by NCSA (an abbreviation you used to read a lot about, back when they were the ones that made the only Web browser: Mosaic). Itanium architecture still powers an SGI-built Altrix 4700, but it was knocked down two pegs to #10.
What bumped these Intel-based systems? IBM Power processor-based systems, for the most part. They now hold six of the top 10 slots, and 22 of the top 50 slots, with 85 entries in the Top 500 altogether. In total, IBM manufactured 192 of the Top 500 machines, including Intel- and AMD-based clusters.
In the all-important race between AMD and Intel, it's Intel that can still claim the greatest number of overall processing engines on the list, with 287. That's up from 263 back in November, while AMD ceded six slots, down to 107. Intel is competing with three different processor architectures: its x86 (EM64T), and 32- and 64-bit Itaniums. AMD has only its x86 Opteron architecture, so it's still holding its own fairly well. Power processors actually also ceded six slots from November, down to 85.
In the supercomputing field, Microsoft has yet to make a serious dent. Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 powered only two machines on the list, the highest ranking one at #106, a Dell PowerEdge 1955 with 1,860 processors, scoring 8997.
Various distributions of Linux, meanwhile, ran on 431 of the Top 500 clusters, with UNIX flavors on 67. Among those, Mac OS X powered three this time around, including a homemade Xserve cluster built for COLSA Corporation. Sadly, though, it's been bumped down from #28 to #50, holding its score of 16,180.
IBM is touting its upcoming BlueGene/P as nearly three times faster than BlueGene/L, and breaking the all-important petaflop barrier. It doesn't take a supercomputer to find out that three times BlueGene/L's current score would only take model P 84% of the way to that mark.