[info] top500 06/2008

Thu Jun 19 13:08:18 UTC 2008

(
the semilog shows continues
highlights from 
http://www.top500.org/lists/2008/06/highlights
pasted below

my two favourites:
Petaflop
System at the bottom of the list beats combined 500 from the 1996 list
)

Main Highlights

 * The new No. 1 system Roadrunner breaks the petaflop/s barrier and is
one of the most energy efficient systems on the TOP500.
 * Four U.S. DOE systems dominate the TOP5.
 * Intel dominates the high-end processor market with 75 percent of all
systems and 90 percent of quad-core based systems.
 * Quad-cores processors are used in 56 percent of the systems. Their
use accelerates performance growth at all levels.
 * Top industrial customer at No. 10 is the French oil company: Total
Exploration Production.
 * IBM defends its top market share ahead of Hewlett-Packard.

---

Power consumption of supercomputers

For the first time, the TOP500 list is also providing power consumption
values for many of the computing systems and it will continue tracking
them in consistent manner. As “name-plate” power ratings can be several
times higher than actual consumed power levels, we decided not to report
name-plate or peak-power ratings at all and to report measured values
only.
Measurements:

For consistency, we asked system manufacturers and owners to measure
power consumption while running the Linpack benchmark. Either the
complete system or part of the system could be measured. If only part of
a system was measured, it had to include all essential hardware such as
shared fans, power supplies in enclosures or racks. Components which
depend heavily on the machine-room environment such as non-essential
disks, water-cooling jackets around air-cooled racks, UPS systems, and
similar parts should be excluded from measurements. Their power
consumption is a reflection of the environment a computer system is used
in and not of the computer system itself. Measurements reported took
place on nodes, blade-enclosures, system racks, or full systems. These
data were then scaled linearly to the full system.
Power Metrics:

Power efficiency is a popular metric used to compare different
technologies. It can be used for this purpose as long as systems of
similar size are compared. Power efficiency, however, is not useful for
ranking individual systems. Due to their basic nature, efficiencies or
densities carry no information about the “size” of an object and
therefore cannot be used to rank system by size as done in the TOP500.
To further increase the potential for misinterpretation, the ratio of
Linpack performance over power consumption will always rank smaller
system of a certain type higher than larger systems of the same type,
giving the false and misleading impression that smaller systems are more
useful for supercomputing than larger systems.

We therefore decided to list (at this point) only absolute power
consumption of systems in the TOP500 itself. We are currently
considering alternative approaches for ranking, which will include
multiple system features such as performance, power consumption, and
memory size.
Results:
General Power Levels:

First results about the general power consumption values reported
include:

 * Average Power consumption of a TOP10 system is 1.32 Mwatt and average
power efficiency is 248 Mflop/s/Watt.
 * Average Power consumption of a TOP50 system is 908 Kwatt and average
power efficiency is 193 Mflop/s/Watt.
 * Average Power consumption of a TOP500 system is 257 kwatt and average
power efficiency is 122 Mflop/s/Watt.

One possible explanation for the decreasing efficiency with rank is that
only newer systems and technologies with better efficiencies can be
found toward the top of the list. Toward the end of the list a mixture
of newer and older technologies lowers the average efficiency level.
Power Efficiencies of Technologies:

Power efficiency values of different systems in the TOP500 are
influenced by a variety of factors such as power consumption, Linpack
efficiency, parallel scaling behavior, and size of system measured. With
these restrictions in mind, we can analyze the collected data and find
in general that:

 * 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 371 Mflop/s/Watt
 * Intel Harpertown quad-core blades are catching up fast:
 o IBM BladeCenter HS21with low-power processors (L5420) up to 265
Mflop/s/Watt
 o SGI Altix ICE 8200EX Xeon nodes (E5472) with high efficient Linpack
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). 

---

Highlights from the Top 10

 * The new Roadrunner system at DOE’s Los Alamos National Laboratory
(LANL) built by IBM broke  as first system ever  the petaflop/s
Linpack barrier with 1.026 petaflop/s. Roadrunner is based on the IBM
QS22 blades which are built with advanced versions of the processor in
the Sony PlayStation 3. These nodes are connected with a commodity
InfiniBand network.
 * The TOP10 shows six new systems and three other systems that improved
their measured speed.
 * The No. 1, 2, 3, and 5 systems are all installed at U.S. DOE
laboratories and all TOP5 systems are in the U.S.
 * The No. 2 system is DOE’s IBM BlueGene/L system, installed at DOE’s
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) with a Linpack performance
of 478.2 Tflop/s.
 * At No. 3 is a brand-new installation of a newer version of the same
type of IBM system. It is a BlueGene/P system installed at DOE’s Argonne
National Laboratory and it achieved 450.3 Tflop/s.
 * The No. 4 system is installed at the Texas Advanced Computing Center
(TACC) at the University of Texas. It is built by Sun using SunBlade
x6420servers and achieved 326 Tflop/s. This is the first time Sun placed
a system in the TOP10.
 * The No. 5 system is a Cray XT4 system installed at DOE’s Oak Ridge
National Laboratory. It was recently upgraded with quad-core processors
and achieved a Linpack performance of 205 Tflop/s.
 * The No. 6 system is the first system on the list outside the U.S. and
is 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, N.M. 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 since November, 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 with 112.5 Tflop/s.
 * The last new system in the TOP10  at No. 10  is also a 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.

----

General highlights from the Top 500 since the last edition
Performance:

 * Quad-core processor based systems have taken over the TOP500 quite
rapidly. Already 283 systems are using them. 203 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 Linpack benchmark can utilize multi-core
processors very well, which led to performance levels increasing above
average across the whole list.
 * The entry level to the list moved up to the 9.0 Tflop/s mark on the
Linpack benchmark, compared to 5.9 Tflop/s six months ago.
 * 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 years of the history of the TOP500 project.
 * Total combined performance has grown to 11.7 Pflop/s, compared to
6.97 Pflop/s six months ago and 4.92 Pflop/s one year ago.
 * The entry point for the top 100 increased in six months from 12.97
Tflop/s to 18.8 Tflop/s.
 * The average concurrency level in the TOP500 is 4,850 cores per system
up from 3,290 six month ago

Technology:

 * A total of 375 systems (75 percent) are now using Intel processors.
This is up from six months ago (354 systems, 70.8 percent) and a
represents the largest share for Intel chips in the TOP500 ever.
 * The IBM Power processors passed the AMD Opteron family and are now
(again) the second most common processor family with 68 systems (13.6
percent), up from 61 systems (12.2 percent) six months ago. Fifty-six
systems (11 percent) are using AMD Opteron processors, down from 78
systems (15.6 percent) six months ago.
 * Multi-core processors are the dominant chip architecture. The most
impressive growth showed the number of systems using the Intel
Harpertown and Clovertown quad core chips, which grew in six months from
102 to 253 systems.
 * The majority of remaining systems uses dual-core processors.
 * 400 systems are labeled as clusters, making this the most common
architecture in the TOP500 with a stable share of 80 percent.
 * Gigabit Ethernet is still the most-used internal system interconnect
technology (285 systems), due to its widespread use at industrial
customers, followed by InfiniBand technology with 120 systems.

Manufacturers:

 * IBM and Hewlett-Packard continue to sell the bulk of systems at all
performance levels of the TOP500.
 * IBM held on to its lead in systems with 210 systems (42 percent) over
HP 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 percent), compared
to HP with 22.4 percent (down from 23.9 percent).
 * In the system category, Dell, SGI and Cray follow with 5.4 percent,
4.4 percent and 3.2 percent respectively.
 * In the performance category, the manufacturers with more than 5
percent are: Cray (6.6 percent of performance), SGI (5.9 percent), and
Dell (5.5 percent of performance), each of which benefits from large
systems in the TOP100.
 * IBM (118) and HP (163) sold together 281 out of 287 systems at
commercial and industrial customers and have had this important market
segment clearly cornered for some time now.

Geographical:

 * 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).

---

Highlights from the Top 50

 * The entry level into the TOP50 is at 35.2 Tflop/s
 * The U.S. has about the same percentage of systems (52 percent) in the
TOP50 than in the TOP500.
 * The dominant architectures are custom-built massively parallel
systems MPPs with 56 percent ahead of commodity clusters with 40
percent.
 * IBM leads the TOP50 with 36 percent of systems and 56 percent of
performance.
 * No 2 is Cray with 14 percent of systems and 10.4 percent of
performance.
 * SGI is third with 10 percent of systems and 7.5 percent of
performance, closely followed by Dell with 10 percent of systems and 4.4
percent of performance.
 * HP, absent from the TOP50 twelve months ago, has now 6 percent of
systems and 5.1 percent of performance.
 * 60 percent of systems are installed at research labs and 34 percent
at universities.
 * There is no system using Gigabit Ethernet in the TOP50.
 * IBM’s BlueGene is the most-used system family with 10 systems (20
percent).
 * Intel processors are used in 38 percent of systems, ahead of IBM’s
Power processors in 34 percent and AMD in 26 percent.
 * The average concurrency level is 24,400 cores per system  up from
15,690 six month ago.