Superpowered computing
Every year the world’s supercomputers get bigger, faster and more powerful. And each year there is a shuffling of the top order as new supercomputers are built and older ones upgraded. But just how quickly are supercomputers improving? We look at some of the numbers that make up the Top500 list of the world’s largest supercomputers.
The biggest
The current supercomputer title holder is a Cray XT5 high performance computer (HPC) called Jaguar, which in November outran former leader “Roadrunner” by a substantial margin. Jaguar clocked up an impressive 1.75 petaflop per second speed, overshadowing IBM’s Roadrunner which turned in a 1.04 petaflop/s performance.
This time around Roadrunner turned in a poorer performance than earlier in the year when it clocked 1.105 petaflop/s in June. Roadrunner does, however, hold the title of being the world’s first supercomputer to break through the petaflop per second barrier, which it did in June 2008.
Old and new
With both Roadrunner and Jaguar clocking performances of well over 1 petaflop/s the competition to be in the top 500 of the world’s supercomputers is increasingly tough.
To be included in the list now a supercomputer has to turn in a performance of at least 20 teraflop/s. Six months ago a speed of 17.1 teraflop/s would have been enough for this honour. And six months before that, in November 2008, 12.6 teraflop/s was adequate for a Top500 place.
Another way to look at it is that the supercomputer ranked number 336 in June would have dropped to position 500 now, had it turned in the same performance.
Processor wars
Of the top 500 of the world’s computers, 402 are built using Intel processors. In second place are the 52 systems built using IBM’s Power processor, and in third spot are the 42 AMD-based systems. Single-core and dual-core processors are disappearing fast in the world of supercomputing, being replaced by quad-core and six-core systems.
In the current list of the 500 top supercomputers, 427 systems are using quad-core processors, compared with just 59 systems running dual-core processors. Just four systems are using single core processors. Six systems are using the Sony PlayStation 3 processor which has 9 cores. AMD’s Istanbul six-core processors are being used in just two Cray systems to date but this will undoubtedly increase in the coming months.
Brand names
IBM and Hewlett-Packard are the two dominant names on the Top500 list. The two companies accounted for the majority of systems built with HP holding onto a narrow lead with 210 systems in the Top500. IBM’s name is on 186 of the Top500 systems. Following that are Cray, SGI and Dell.
In the overall performance stakes, however, IBM accounted for the largest slice of the performance pie, its systems together making up 35.1% of the total Top500 performance. HP accounted for 23%, followed by Cray (15.9%) and SGI (6.6%).
Countries
AS with many things the US is the dominant user of HPCs with 277 of the 500 systems. European supercomputers follow with 153 systems and Asia with 50 systems. South Africa has just one HPC in the Top500. Tsessebe, which occupies position 311, is based at the Centre for High Performance Computing in Cape Town.
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