Supercomputing

[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]

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]

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]

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]

Checks solved:

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

[HenryTo]

The democratization of supercomputing:

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

[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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

A summary of the great gains made in the high-performance computing space over the last four to five years:

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=308394&intsrc=news_ts_head

[HenryTo]

In the "be careful what you wish for" department (along with true broadband stretching across the world) - but then, this is still 10 to 15 years away.
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IBM says breakthrough heralds supercomputer on chip
Thu Dec 6, 2007 1:25pm EST

By Georgina Prodhan

FRANKFURT (Reuters) - IBM (IBM.N: Quote, Profile, Research) says it has made a breakthrough in converting electrical signals into light pulses that brings closer the day when supercomputing, which now requires huge machines, will be done on a single chip.

In research published on Thursday in the journal Optics Express, IBM said it had produced electro-optic modulators 100 to 1,000 times smaller than comparable silicon photonics modulators and small enough to fit on a processor chip.

By connecting processing cores on a chip by light instead of with wires, the problems of high energy consumption and heat generated by multi-core chips could be bypassed, enabling leaps in computing power.

IBM said it had reached a "milestone" in the quest to connect hundreds or thousands of processing cores on a tiny chip. By comparison there are nine cores on the sophisticated chips that power the Sony (6753.T: Quote, Profile, Research) PlayStation 3 games console.

"Just like fiber optic networks have enabled the rapid expansion of the Internet by enabling users to exchange huge amounts of data from anywhere in the world, IBM's technology is bringing similar capabilities to the computer chip," said Will Green, IBM's lead scientist on the project.

He said using light instead of wires to send information between the cores could be as much as 100 times faster and use 10 times less power than wires.

Green told Reuters IBM had used standard industry processes and tools to make the tiny silicon Mach-Zehnder electro-optic modulators.

CHALLENGES AHEAD

That gave the research team confidence the process could be replicated commercially, although it would likely take at least a decade for that stage to be reached.

"We're looking at much more real-world applications in the timeframe of 10 to 15 years or something like that. There's a lot of pieces to come together. There are many challenges ahead," Green said in an interview.

He said in future tiny supercomputers on a chip could expend as little energy as a lightbulb, paving the way for enormous reductions in cost, energy, heat and space required while increasing communications bandwidth.

Technology services company IBM is also the world leader in supercomputers, which are used for problems requiring intensive calculations, for example in quantum physics, weather forecasting and molecular modeling.

Drastically shrinking the size and energy requirements of supercomputing could open up possibilities of powerful data analysis in remote locations or high-resolution three-dimensional image rendering in real time, Green said.

"You immediately can envision the mobile applications that that would allow you to do," he said. "Remote laboratory instruments for medical applications, screening for diseases or even complicated DNA analysis."

IBM's research team has been working on the project, partly funded by a U.S. government defense research agency, for about five years. Green declined to comment on the project's budget.

He also said it was impossible to predict what a supercomputer on a chip might eventually cost. "We're really at the beginning of the process," he said.

(Editing by Sue Thomas and David Holmes)

[HenryTo]

The Constellation - Sun's and AMD's own supercomputer at UT Austin - is unveiled. A peak performance of 500 teraflops would put it in the number one spot on the "Top 500 list" if it is published today:

http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9871531-7.html?tag=nefd.top

[HenryTo]

Supercomputing over the last 15 years. Page 3 shows the increase in U.S. domination in the supercomputing space - from the first "Top 500 list" in 1993 to the latest one in November 2007. Note the relative decline of Japan as a supercomputing power over the last 15 years:

http://www.top500.org/files/TOP500_Looking_back_HWM.pdf

Other notable quotes: