New ratings for supercomputer power

Rethink IT, August, 2004

Big iron ruled again recently as SuperCon, the Supercomputer Conference in Heidelberg Germany, brought everyone's attention to the growing business of very powerful computers.

The focus today has been on the first showing of the Top 500 list, which lists in order of power, the top 500 installed supercomputers on the planet.

For the third year running the official largest computer in the world goes to The Earth Simulator supercomputer, built by NEC and installed in 2002 at the Earth Simulator Center in Yokohama, Japan. It produced a performance on the Linpack benchmark of 35.86Tflop/s (teraflops or trillions of calculations per second).

However, the other positions in the top 10 showed significant changes, including the first ever Chinese entry.

At number two we have Thunder, an Intel Itanium2-based cluster system at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California.

At numbers four and eight are the prototypes for the upcoming IBM BlueGene/L system. The prototypes are a joint development of LLNL and IBM and are currently at IBM's facility. The final system will be installed at LLNL and is expected to replace the Earth Simulator as the most powerful computer by the middle of next year.

Sixth in line is a new IBM p690 system with 1.9GHz Power4 processors. The first such system in the world, it is installed at the European Center for Medium Range Weatherforecasting in the UK, and is the biggest box in Europe.

The first Chinese system ever to enter the top 10 was assembled by Chinese company Dawning, based on AMD's Opteron chip and Los Angeles-based Myricom's Myrinet interconnect network.

The number of systems exceeding the ITflop/s mark on the Linpack benchmark jumped from 130 to 242-almost half the list, so power is on the way up and there is the money to pay for supercomputing.

The 500th system on the list, with 624Gigaflop/s, was listed at Number 242 in the last Top 500 just six months ago. This marks a record turnover rate in the 11-year history of the Top 500. Also, the lowest ranked system six months ago was 403.4Gflop/s.

Total accumulated performance, 813Tflop/s, is approaching the level of a Petaflop/s. This compares with a total of 528Tflop/s six months ago.

But the biggest trend must be the shift to general purpose chips inside these devices. A total of 287 systems are now using Intel processors. Six months ago, there were 189 Intel-based systems on the list and one year ago only 119. The second most common processors are IBM Power processor (75 systems) ahead of HP's PA-Risc processors (57) and AMD making a huge leap up to 34 from just around 10 this time last year, courtesy of its Opteron chip that suits the building of supercomputers so well because it offers code compatibility with 32-bit devices in a hybrid 32/64-bit architecture.

At present, IBM and Hewlett-Packard sell the bulk of systems at all performance levels of the Top 500. IBM became clear leader in this edition of the Top 500 list with 44.80% of the systems and 50.12% of installed performance. HP is second with 28% of the systems and 18.5% of total performance. No other manufacturer is able to capture more than 6% in any category.