Roadrunner stays the fastest
THE ROADRUNNER supercomputer at the US Los Alamos National Laboratory has held on to the title of the world's fastest computer.
According to the biannual ranking of high performance computing (HPC) systems Top 500 list, two new systems have appeared in the top 10.
The IBM BlueGene/P called Jugene, a PowerPC 450 machine, and the Juropa, a Sun system with Intel Xeon X5570 processors, are both at the Forschungszentrum Juelich research centre in Germany.
Jugene can manage 825.5 teraflops and the Juropa 274.8 teraflops, which are a fair few flops. But the IBM Roadrunner, which uses PowerXcell 8i processors, still retains first place with blistering 1.105 petaflops performance.
The Roadrunner was the first to break the petaflops barrier in June 2008 and while it received some stiff competition from the Cray XT5 Jaguar system at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, at 1.059 petaflops, it seems the Roadrunner is still beating the best that Acme enterprises and everyone else can throw at it.
More than 291 of the Top 500 systems are based in the United States. The figures show that HP has more machines in the latest Top 500 list than any other hardware maker, although IBM, on average, still makes higher performing systems. Quad-core processor based systems are under the bonnet of 383 of the 500 systems.
According to the figures, 399 systems are now using Intel chips. IBM Power processors are the next most popular, driving 55 of the systems. AMD Opteron CPUs are used in 43 systems. µ
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Notice it's up to public (government) institutions to push the envelope.
it goes to show that something is afoot since AMD has PWNED the HPC space since Opteron.
If they are in the number one and two systems, they should be in many more than 43.
It's nice to see some a new 2P Nehalem machine in the mix, though obviously it is not running many processors with it attaining "only" 275 Tflops. I'm sure when the 8-core, quad-channel Beckton is integrated into a new supercomputer it will blow away everything else.
But what I don't understand is why so many of the HPC machines are running Intel. Until recently with Nehalem, AMD's Opteron was a far better performer with high-bandwidth HPC workloads because of the integrated memory controller and Hypertransport. So why are there only 43 Opteron machines on the list?
@vondrashek
Your post is almost completely unintelligible.
I have no what "i7 is Playstation 3 Processor For GODS Sake." means.
The CELL BE processors used in IBM's roadrunner are variants of the Cell in Sony's PS3. And I assume by "I7", you mean "Core I7" which is intel's Bloomfield Nehalem CPU. I'm not sure what you are trying to say though.
What exactly are the 291 US machines actually doing?
A few for weather forecasting, a few more for modelling the design for a nuke blast the exact shape of North Korea, and a few for helping NASA with their metric/imperial measurement conversions so they can actually land on a planet/moon and not just make a new crater on it...
Well in my book that leave about 200...
There must be first world countries who only have a couple (if that), and they're still first world. So whatever they are doing, it can't be that crucial to existence. Certainly not as crucial as the amount of juice they are sucking up!
Most scientific progress and projects are the result of war or preparation for it anyway. In modern times that would include the air travel, space program, the Internet, supercomputing, etc. all the result of war.
So whatever these facilities are for, you can bet it's for war, and to that end we still benefit as we always have.
Steve,
"There must be first world countries who only have a couple (if that), and they're still first world. So whatever they are doing, it can't be that crucial to existence. Certainly not as crucial as the amount of juice they are sucking up!"
Some of us like to play Crysis full detail!
vondrashek is a pretty lousy bot so don't expect his posts to have any sense.
I think is time for the INQ IT guys to change their "state of art" Captcha and make it a little better or just plug it out.
Also, what about to start using the poll thing.
I think we need a few of these supercomputers to decipher what the hell Vondrashek is saying.
Then again, maybe that won't be enough.