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from the becha-they-don't-run-systemd dept.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/almost-all-the-worlds-fastest-supercomputers-run-linux/
Other than systems running Linux, there are two Chinese supercomputers running IBM AIX, a Unix variant. This pair, tied at 386 and 387, may not be long for the list. That's because supercomputers are growing ever faster.
[...] When the first TOP500 supercomputer list was compiled in June 1993, Linux was just gathering steam. Since 1998 when it first appeared on the list, Linux has consistently dominated the top 10. Since June 2010, Linux has run 90 percent of the world's fastest computers.
Before Linux jumped ahead, Unix was supercomputing's top dog. Since 2003, the top operating system has flipped from being 96 percent Unix to being 96 percent Linux. By 2004, Linux had taken over the lead and has yet to surrender it.
By 2017, Linux may have eliminated all its competition.
[Continues...]
takyon: There are some new entrants to the top 10 of the TOP500 list:
The top of the list did receive a mild shakeup with two new systems in the top ten. The Cori supercomputer, a Cray XC40 system installed at Berkeley Lab's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), slipped into the number 5 slot with a Linpack rating of 14.0 petaflops. Right behind it at number 6 is the new Oakforest-PACS supercomputer, a Fujitsu PRIMERGY CX1640 M1 cluster, which recorded a Linpack mark of 13.6 petaflops. Oakforest-PACS is up and running at Japan's Joint Center for Advanced High Performance Computing (JCAHPC). Both machines owe their computing prowess to the Intel "Knights Landing" Xeon Phi 7250, a 68-core processor that delivers 3 peak teraflops of performance.
The addition of Cori and Oakforest-PACS pushed every system below them a couple of notches down, with the exception of Piz Daint, a Cray supercomputer installed at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS). It maintained its spot at number 8 as a result of a massive 3.5 petaflop upgrade, courtesy of newly installed NVIDIA P100 Tesla GPUs. Piz Daint also has the honor of being the second most energy-efficient supercomputer in the TOP500, with a rating of 7.45 gigaflops/watt. It is topped by NVIDIA's in-house DGX SATURNV system, the only other system on the list equipped with the new P100 GPUs. It is a 3.3-petaflop cluster of DGX-1 servers that delivers 9.46 gigaflops/watt. To offer some perspective here, the nominal goal for the first exascale systems is 50 gigaflops/watt.
(Score: 2) by martyb on Thursday November 17 2016, @06:19PM
I've been following the TOP500 list from its inception, and was dismayed a while back when I could not retrieve any of the earliest lists. Does anyone have links on where they might be found?
I suspect we have reached the point where one's smartphone has more 'computes' than some of the systems on the earliest lists... but am unable, now, to access what the original scores were.
A supercomputer in your pocket — are we there yet?
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 3, Funny) by bob_super on Thursday November 17 2016, @06:51PM
Yes. People have more processing power in their pocket than it took to send man to the moon. They use it to fill their world with cats and dicks.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 18 2016, @07:53AM
Huh? My phone won't take me to the moon. What is wrong, it must be broken, should I upgrade?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 17 2016, @09:20PM
The TOP500 started in 1993 and I just pulled up the list from 1993 on their website.
https://www.top500.org/statistics/sublist/ [top500.org]
Seems like an iphone 6 is just about on par with the fastest machines from that era.
(Score: 2) by martyb on Thursday November 17 2016, @11:10PM
They fixed it? Nice! At some point several years ago, I found that the first few years' worth of the TOP500 list "disappeared" — there were links that, when followed, provided either a 404 Not Found error or pointed to a page which linked to another which linked back to the starting page. I checked back several times over the years and repeatedly got the same results. I had assumed that this was still the case, so I am very much pleased to hear that they have rectified that problem. History survives! Thank You!
That said, it does indeed appear from those results that a modern smartphone (as you note, an iPhone 6) would rank highly against systems on that original list. (For the curious, the calculations are 64-bit floating point operations; as per their FAQ [top500.org].
Again, many thanks for the reply!
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 2) by forkazoo on Saturday November 19 2016, @05:05AM
If you look at single threaded performance, some of those machines in the earliest list were less than 1 MFlops per CPU. So, not only is your cell phone faster, the little microcontroller that is separate from the application processor in your phone's LTE modem would be faster. I think this one has the slowest single threaded performance because it was built around 1024 little units: https://www.top500.org/system/167425 [top500.org]
If single threaded performance is too absurd a metric for comparison, the slowest total throughput system ever to make the top 500 list seems to be this one: https://www.top500.org/system/166808 [top500.org] with 4 Convex 59 MHz CPU's is managed roughly an admirable 400 Megaflops. Honestly, I think you can probably go back even further than the original iPhone to something like the old Symbian Nokia n95. It apparently has 2x Arm11 Cores at 300+ MHz according to a quick Google. I dunno exactly what it got in GFlops terms, but if it can pull off anywhere near 1 FLOP/cycle, it'd be in the right ballpark.