Linux Clusters Finally Break the TeraFLOP barrier 223
cworley submitted - several times - this well-linked submission about a slightly boring topic - fast computers. "Top500.org
has just released its latest
list of the world's fastest supercomputers (updated twice yearly). For
the first time, Linux Beowulf clusters
have joined the teraFLOP club, with six new clusters breaking the teraFLOP
barrier. Two Linux clusters now rank in the Top 10: Lawrence Livermore's "MCR" (built by Linux NetworX ) ranks #5 achieving 5.694 teraFLOP/s, and Forecast Systems Laboratory's "Jet" (built by HPTi) ranks #8 reaching
3.337 TeraFLOP/s. Other Linux clusters surpassing the teraFLOP/s barrier
include:
LSU's "SuperMike" at #17 (from Atipa
), the University at Buffalo
at #22 and Sandia National Lab at
#32 (both from Dell ), an Itanium cluster
for British Petroleum Houston at #42 (from HP
), and Argonne National Labs at
#46 (from Linux NetworX ) reached just
over the one teraFLOP/s mark with 361 processors. In the previous Top500 list compiled last June, the fastest Intel based Netfinity 1024 processor clusters from IBM were sub-teraFLOP/s and the University of Heidelberg's AMD based "HELICS" cluster (built by
Megware
) held the top tux rank at #35 with 825 GFLOP/s."
Re:FLOPs (Score:1, Informative)
FLOPS=Floating Point Operations per Second
Impressive numbers (Score:3, Informative)
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Re:Wow! (Score:3, Informative)
a 64 GFlop Nec SX-6 supercomputer. (5,120 CPUs total).
It has its own dedicated, custom-built power station. 'nuff said.
Google is your friend, but for starters:
http://www.sw.nec.co.jp/hpc/sx-e/sx6/index.html
http://www.nec.co.jp/press/en/0203/0801.html
Re:Wow! (Score:3, Informative)
One big item to note is that many of the supercomputers built in the US are for weapons research; as opposed to the NEC supercomputer, which deals with, obviously, changes of the earth.
More links:
Press release for the Earth Simulator [nec.co.jp], dated March 8, 2002
General system information on the cluster [nec.co.jp]
Re:Have another coffee while it Boots (Score:3, Informative)
Flops is not everything (Score:5, Informative)
A real supercomputer supports much faster I/O, higher interconnection bandwidth and lower interconnection latency.
And btw. the new Cray X1 [cray.com] delivers the performance of a all but the largest linux-clusters in a single cabinet (820 GFlops peak that is..). In terms of computing efficiency it makes even the Earth Simulator look pale. I am really looking forward to the next iteration of the TOP500, when the first X1 machines are included.
Re:It seems like the Apple Mac..... (Score:3, Informative)
Check out... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Wow! (Score:2, Informative)