Supercomputing

[HenryTo]

Cray's supercomputer at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) upgraded (doubled) its performance to 119 teraflops - putting it number 2 on the world's Top 500 list of supercomputers:

http://www.hpcwire.com/hpc/1370386.html

[HenryTo]

The new, semi-annual, edition of the "Top 500" list has been released:

http://www.top500.org/blog/2007/11/09/30th_edition_top500_list_world_s_fastest_supercomputers_released_big_turnover_among_top_10_systems

[HenryTo]

It looks like that NEC is the dark horse here - note that its "Earth Simulator" took everyone by surprise when it took the number 1 spot in 2002:

http://www.dailytech.com/NEC+Showcases+Worlds+Most+Powerful+Commercial+Computer/article9429.htm

[HenryTo]

Forget the idea of "supercomputing on a desktop." The latest topic is "supercomputing on a handheld device," and this could be only a decade away:

http://www.itwire.com/content/view/14962/1066/

[HenryTo]

One of the first supercomputing systems shipped based on the IBM Blue Gene/P processor. This relatively small two-rack system - at 27 TFLOPS -would place in at number 27 in the "Top 500 List" of the world's fastest supercomputers:

http://www.oakridger.com/stories/100107/new_204347010.shtml

http://www.top500.org/static/lists/2007/06/TOP500_200706.xls

[HenryTo]

The Folding@Home distributed computing project (run by Stanford University) reaches 1 Petaflops in processing power, with the majority of the contribution coming from Playstation 3 consoles:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,137396-c,gameconsoles/article.html

[HenryTo]

The democratization of supercomputing:

http://computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&taxonomyName=hardware&articleId=301449&taxonomyId=12&intsrc=kc_feat

[HenryTo]

Checks solved:

http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/editorial/story.html?id=f45388f4-af10-47ff-a42e-f4780297008f

[HenryTo]

A bold conjecture that supercomputers and advanced modeling techniques will ultimately do away with both animal and human drugs testing:

http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=conWebDoc.13021

A background of the Weizmann Institute of Science:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weizmann_Institute_of_Science

[HenryTo]

PC Magazine's list of 13 technologies that will change the world between now and 2020:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2147453,00.asp

Some things PC Mag left off:

1) Cheap solar power for the first time in history
2) The concept of "a supercomputer on a desktop"
3) PC Mag mentioned 4G wireless technology - I believe wireless technology will be much more capable of 3 to 4 mbps come 2020
4) Much faster long-distance air travel, enhanced by affordable sub-orbital space flights

[HenryTo]

Hot off the press. Highlights from the June 2007 Top 500 list. U.S. clearly the dominant power in this field, with the UK coming a distance second, Germany third, and Japan fourth. Note that an up and coming power in the supercomputing arena - surprise, surpise - is China (although it dipped slightly in the latest list).
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General highlights from the Top 500 since the last edition
All changes are from November 2006 to June 2007:

The entry level to the list moved up to the 4.005 TFlop/s mark on the Linpack benchmark, compared to 2.737 TFlop/s six months ago.

The last system on the list would have been listed at position 216 in the last TOP500 just six months ago. This is the largest turnover rate ever seen in the 15 years of the TOP500 project.

Total accumulated performance has grown to 4.92 PFlop/s, compared to 3.54 PFlop/s six months ago and 2.79 PFlop/s one year ago.

The entry point for the top 100 increased in six months from 6.65 TFlop/s to 9.29 TFlop/s.

A total of 289 systems (57.8 percent) are now using Intel processors. This is slightly up from six month ago (261 systems, 52.5 percent) and a represents a typical fraction recently seen for Intel chips in the TOP500.

The AMD Opteron family, which passed the IBM Power processors six month ago, remained the second most common processor family with 105 systems (21 percent) down from 113 systems (22.6 percent) six month ago. 85 systems (17 percent) use IBM Power processors down from 93 systems (18.6 percent) six month ago.

Dual core processors are the dominant chip architecture. The most impressive growth showed the number of systems using the Intel Woodcrest dual core chips which grew in six month from 31 to 205.
Another 90 systems use Opteron dual core processors up from 75 six month ago.

373 systems are labeled as clusters, making this the most common architecture in the TOP500 with a stable share of 74.6 percent.

InfiniBand technology is strongly increasing its share to 127 systems up from 78 six months ago. But Gigabit Ethernet is still the most used internal system interconnect technology (207 systems, down from 211 six month ago).

For quit some time, IBM and Hewlett-Packard sell the bulk of systems at all performance levels of the TOP500.

IBM was ahead of HP since June 2004 but has lost the lead in the number of system this time with 38.4 percent (down from 47.2) compared to HP with 40.6 percent (up from 31.6).

IBM remains the clear leader in the TOP500 list in performance with 41.9 percent of installed performance (down from 49.5) compared to HP with 24.5 percent (up from 16.5).

In the system category again no other manufacturer could break the 5 percent barrier, but Dell got very close with 4.8 percent.

In the performance category the manufacturers with more than 5 percent are: Dell (9 percent of performance), Cray (7.3 percent of performance), and SGI (5.7 percent), each of which benefit from large systems in the TOP10.

IBM (82) and HP (181) sold together 263 out of 269 systems at commercial and industrial customers and have this important market segment clearly cornered.

The U.S. is clearly the leading consumer of HPC systems with 281 of the 500 systems. The European share (127 systems up from 95) recovered and is again larger then the Asian share (72 down from 79 systems).
Dominant countries in Asia are Japan with 23 systems (down from 30) and China with 13 systems (down from 1.

In Europe, UK has established itself as the No. 1 with 43 systems (32 six months ago). Germany has to live with the No. 2 spot with 24 systems (19 six month ago).

[HenryTo]

The petaflop era has now officially begun. IBM is introducing the Blue Gene/P as we speak at the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, Germany.

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9584_22-6193211.html

[HenryTo]

The hits just keep on coming. Sun Microsystems announces the new Constellation supercomputing system - a machine that is capable of a peak performance of 500 teraflops. This is being deployed at the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas and should be completed later this year:

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9584_22-6193207.html

[HenryTo]

Intel is due to release its 80-core >1 teraflop processor sometime in 2010, or even as early as 2009:

http://www.itnews.com.au/newsstory.aspx?CIaNID=54750&src=site-marq

[dash]

This as far as I'm aware this is the world's first on demand supercomputer available for $1/cpu-hr. All you need is a credit card and a browser:

http://www.network.com/

Many non-IT companies have spent a lot of time and money building network/storage/software grids of their own, just as many factories started off by building and installing their own generators before the advent of the electricity grid during the industrial revolution. Why do it yourself when you can outsource from someone who does it better?

Also when net connectivity is faster and more ubiquitous it's got to make more sense for consumers to want to store and access all their data online (though privacy, security issues are clearly a problem). Why not put the operating system itself online? Viruses and software upgrades become less problematic, and you're computer won't crash.

I think it was Google's Schmidt who said something like: when the network becomes as fast as the processor, the computer hollows out and spreads across the network. If this is the next stage of computing then I think the issues which are important are not what operating sytem you have, or how fast is your CPU, it all comes down to bandwidth and latency.

[HenryTo]

Dash,

Correct me if I am wrong, but I had thought that Mr. Chambers was talking about worldwide bandwidth growth. But then again, you are most probably correct - since bandwidth demand going forward should be driven more by U.S. apps as opposed to new internet users in China/India who are just probably going to send a few emails each day or just IM each other.

Besides streaming video, I would imagine that bandwidth would also be significantly driven by not only software distribution, but the distribution of information for business/military purposes as well - such as gene information, sophisticated 3-D designs of products as well as 3-D imaging of current products and geography, as well as your "traditional" databases. Combined with the "coming of age" of the one petaflop supercomputer over the next few years - that means that GM Chinese/Indian designers in 2012 to 2015 could design an entirely new automobile without building the physical model - using hardware and software alone - and then have the necessary bandwidth to send the design to their U.S. co-workers for review fairly quickly.

Of course, this assumption also hinges on the fact that software development will continue to improve going forward.