Jaguar supercomputer races past Roadrunner in Top500
The Cray XT5 supercomputer.
(Credit: Image courtesy of the National Center for Computational Sciences, Oak Ridge National Laboratory)The Cray XT5 supercomputer known as "Jaguar" has finally clawed its way to the title of fastest computer in the world.
Sitting back at No. 2 on the Top500 list of supercomputers for more than a year, Jaguar overtook IBM's "Roadrunner" according to the twice-yearly list that will be unveiled Tuesday at the SC09 Conference in Portland, Ore.
Jaguar beat out the competition by showing it can process 1.75 petaflop/s, or quadrillions of floating point operations per second, according to the Top500 Linpack benchmark. IBM's Roadrunner was pushed back to No. 2 by posting a processing speed of 1.04 petaflop/s, a dip from the 1.105 petaflop/s it reached in a June 2009 test. The slower performance this time around is apparently due to a repartitioning of the system.
Every six months when the Top500 List is released the threshold to grab a place on it gets higher. The slowest supercomputer (No. 500) on November's list posted a speed of 20 teraflop/s, up from the 17.1 teraflop/s of six months ago. In other words, what is the slowest computer this time around would have been No. 336 in June.
Kraken, another Cray XT5 system, jumped up two places from its former No. 5 position by posting a processing performance speed of 832 teraflop/s. IBM's BlueGene/P, from Forschungszentrum Juelich in Germany, came in at No. 4 with 825.5 teraflop/s. At No. 5 is China's Tianhe-1, the highest ranking ever for a Chinese supercomputer.
The top 10, while still dominated by supercomputers housed in the United States, had just one newcomer. That would be Sandia National Laboratories' "Red Sky," a Sun Blade system that posted a Linpack performance of 423 teraflop/s.
Just as the last time the list was released, the Top500 list is made up mostly of Hewlett-Packard and IBM computers. HP accounted for 210 of this year's 500, and IBM 185. In terms of processors in use, Intel still enjoys the lion's share, with 80 percent. The most popular operating system is Linux, with 90 percent of the Top500.
Here's the Top 10:
Jaguar, Cray, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (1.75 petaflop/s)
Roadrunner, IBM, Los Alamos National Laboratory (1.04 petaflop/s)
Kraken XT5, Cray, National Institute for Computational Sciences (832 teraflop/s)
JUGENE, IBM, Forschungszentrum Juelich (825.5 teraflop/s)
Tianhe-1, NUDT, National SuperComputer Center in Tianjin (563.1 teraflop/s)
Pleiades, SGI, NASA Ames Research Center (544.3 teraflop/s)
BlueGeneL, IBM, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (478.2 teraflop/s)
BlueGene/P, IBM, Argonne National Laboratory (458.61 teraflop/s)
Ranger, Sun, Texas Advanced Computing Center (433.20 teraflop/s)
Red Sky, Sun, Sandia National Laboratories (423.9 teraflop/s)
For the full Top500 List head to the official site.
Erica Ogg is a CNET News reporter who covers Apple, HP, Dell, and other PC makers, as well as the consumer electronics industry. She's also one of the hosts of CNET News' Daily Podcast. In her non-work life, she's a history geek, a loyal Dodgers fan, and a mac-and-cheese connoisseur. E-mail Erica. 
http://www.cray.com/Products/XT5/Product/Software.aspx
HPC's don't run Exchange or SQL Server or all the apps people normally run on Windows. HPC's are generally managed by sophisticated users, so things like vendor support and ease of use are less important. If you want a base OS to run compute intensive custom software on, there is not much difference between cpu cycles under different OS's. There is a price difference. You probably want the OS to more "get out of the way" than to "provide rich services".
The "Windows OS" includes a large set of services other than the kernel. Things like the .net runtime and class library, the distributed transaction manager, the message queuing systems, the RPC system, the extensive performance and event analysis system. For compute nodes, these are all just useless baggage. For say a server running company specific business code, all the mechanism that comes with Windows saves a vast amount of work and provides a framework for application developers. When I say business code, I mean the software that makes your bank statement show up every month, or the software that tracks the inventory at your local store. In these uses, the hardware and OS cost are a tiny fraction of the overall system cost.
One could argue that for best CPU utilization, HPC's should not run ANY of the current OS's. Simply running with virtual memory protection enabled causes a performance hit. Single memory accesses turn into multiple accesses to walk the page tables when TLB misses happen. Limited processor cache memory is consumed by page tables and not program data. Some analysts suggest this overhead is not all that small.
http://www.top500.org/stats/list/34/osfam
There are 5 of the 500 system using Windows HPC. That number has not changed in the last 4 lists. Linux is on 446 of the systems.
After all, today's pocket calculators & PDAs blow away the old supercomputers of the 1970's... and 1980's most likely...
http://smart-machines.blogspot.com/2008/11/jaguar-supercomputer-for-scientific.html
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/11/most-powerful-supercomputer/
I have also heart that Windoze high performance computers are irreplaceable in the annual Redmond chair throwing events, unrivaled in their unique feature of throwing up a BSOD in mere fractions of a nano-second, in case anyone manages to throw more chairs at competitors than the CHAIRMAN Mr Balmer.
:-)
Arthur
- by teamrubixcube November 28, 2009 9:07 AM PST
- Do you think it can smoothly render Crysis? ;)
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