TOP500 Supercomputer Sites For 2006

geaux writes to let us know about the release of the 28th TOP500 List of the world's fastest supercomputers. From the article: "The IBM BlueGene/L system, installed at DOE's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, retains the No. 1 spot with a Linpack performance of 280.6 teraflops (trillions of calculations per second, or Tflop/s). The new No. 2 systems is Sandia National Laboratories' Cray Red Storm supercomputer, only the second system ever to be recorded to exceed the 100 Tflops/s mark with 101.4 Tflops/s... Slipping to No. 3 is the IBM eServer Blue Gene Solution system, installed at IBM's Thomas Watson Research Center, with 91.20 Tflops/s Linpack performance." You need over 6.6 Tflop/s to make it into the top 100.

Real world examples

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone know of any real world examples that might give us a better understanding of how fast these things really are?

Re:beowulf

[TinyManCan]

Shoot a couple of the Nvida G80 based GPUs should do the trick just as well :)

Re:Real world examples

[thejrwr]

its about 1 billion p4 2.5ghz processors put together

Big difference between #1 and #2

[max99ted]

...No. 1 spot with a Linpack performance of 280.6 teraflops... new No. 2 system... 101.4 Tflops/s

Anyone have any insight as to why the huge difference between the top two spots? It seems that the rest (3 -> down) are a lot closer in speeds...

3 out of 4 of supercomputers agree

[waif69]

Linux is the operating system to use.
FTA

Operating system Family: Linux
Count: 376
Share %: 75.20%
                   

Password Cracker

[Bender0x7D1]

We have #141 on the list at Iowa State and we booked time on it so it could be used as a password cracker at one of our Cyber Defense Competitions.

I don't know if it actually got used, or if it was deemed "unfair" for the red team (attackers) to use it. It would have been pretty sweet if they were allowed to.

These competitions are pretty cool, and have some pretty good challenges like the red team pulling the fire alarm at 3:00AM, forcing the blue team (defenders) to evacuate the building. More info can be found at the ISU Information Assurance Student Group website [iastate.edu], or the competition website. [iastate.edu]

Re:Big difference between #1 and #2

[flaming-opus]

Well #1 needs a lot of asterixes next to it. The Blue Gene architecture uses an increadible number of relatively underpowered compute nodes, each with relatively little memory, and strings them together into a cluster. It's a system architecture designed around VERY LOW COST. It works quite well for a few problems, but is difficult to use for many real world problems. Because it costs so little to build, those Department of Energy guys with the big pockets can build a VERY fast computer, at least on paper.

#2 is a more general purpose supercomputer, with a better balance of processor count, processor performance, and memory. The DOE spent a LOT of money on this machine, and thus it has a very high level of performance.

After that, you see a mix of high and low efficiency machines, but few people have the can fork over the hundreds of millions of dollars necessary for a machine that powerful. It's all about the $$$.

I'll point out, however, that the Earth Simulator is still ranked #14, 5 years after it came on-line. Of course it also cost hundreds of millions of dollars at the time.

Distributed Computing Wins Again...

[jemecki]

I know this isn't a fair comparison but the SETI@Home grid runs at 250 TeraFLOPS. Many of the other massive distributed computing projects run far into the Top 500 as well. reference [boincstats.com]