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posted by martyb on Tuesday June 20 2017, @03:34PM   Printer-friendly
from the Is-that-a-Cray-in-your-pocket? dept.

A new list was published on top500.org. It might be noteworthy that the NSA, Google, Amazon, Microsoft etc. are not submitting information to this list. Currently, the top two places are occupied by China, with a comfortable 400% head-start in peak-performance and 370% Rmax performance to the 3rd place (Switzerland). US appears on rank 4, Japan on rank 7, and Germany is not in the top ten at all.

All operating systems in the top-10 are Linux and derivates. It seems obvious that, since it is highly optimized hardware, only operating systems are viable which can be fine-tune (so, either open source or with vendor-support for such customizations). Still I would have thought that, since a lot of effort needs to be invested anyway, maybe other systems (BSD?) could be equally suited to the task.

RankSiteSystemCoresRmax (TFlop/s)Rpeak (TFlop/s)Power (kW)
1China: National Supercomputing Center in WuxiSunway TaihuLight - Sunway MPP, Sunway SW26010 260C 1.45GHz, Sunway - NRCPC10,649,60093,014.6125,435.915,371
2China: National Super Computer Center in GuangzhouTianhe-2 (MilkyWay-2) - TH-IVB-FEP Cluster, Intel Xeon E5-2692 12C 2.200GHz, TH Express-2, Intel Xeon Phi 31S1P - NUDT3,120,00033,862.754,902.417,808
3Switzerland: Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS)Piz Daint - Cray XC50, Xeon E5-2690v3 12C 2.6GHz, Aries interconnect , NVIDIA Tesla P100 - Cray Inc.361,76019,590.025,326.32,272
4U.S.: DOE/SC/Oak Ridge National LaboratoryTitan - Cray XK7, Opteron 6274 16C 2.200GHz, Cray Gemini interconnect, NVIDIA K20x - Cray Inc.560,64017,590.027,112.58,209
5U.S.: DOE/NNSA/LLNLSequoia - BlueGene/Q, Power BQC 16C 1.60 GHz, Custom - IBM1,572,86417,173.220,132.77,890
6U.S.: DOE/SC/LBNL/NERSCCori - Cray XC40, Intel Xeon Phi 7250 68C 1.4GHz, Aries interconnect - Cray Inc.622,33614,014.727,880.73,939
7Japan: Joint Center for Advanced High Performance ComputingOakforest-PACS - PRIMERGY CX1640 M1, Intel Xeon Phi 7250 68C 1.4GHz, Intel Omni-Path - Fujitsu556,10413,554.624,913.52,719
8Japan: RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science (AICS)K computer, SPARC64 VIIIfx 2.0GHz, Tofu interconnect - Fujitsu705,02410,510.011,280.412,660
9U.S.: DOE/SC/Argonne National LaboratoryMira - BlueGene/Q, Power BQC 16C 1.60GHz, Custom - IBM786,4328,586.610,066.33,945
10U.S.: DOE/NNSA/LANL/SNLTrinity - Cray XC40, Xeon E5-2698v3 16C 2.3GHz, Aries interconnect - Cray Inc.301,0568,100.911,078.94,233

takyon: TSUBAME3.0 leads the Green500 list with 14.110 gigaflops per Watt. Piz Daint is #3 on the TOP500 and #6 on the Green500 list, at 10.398 gigaflops per Watt.

According to TOP500, this is only the second time in the history of the list that the U.S. has not secured one of the top 3 positions.

The #100 and #500 positions on June 2017's list have an Rmax of 1.193 petaflops and 432.2 teraflops respectively. Compare to 1.0733 petaflops and 349.3 teraflops for the November 2016 list.

[Update: Historical lists can be found on https://www.top500.org/lists/. There was a time when you only needed 0.4 gigaflops to make the original Top500 list — how do today's mobile phones compare? --martyb]


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 20 2017, @06:45PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 20 2017, @06:45PM (#528640)

    As someone in the HPC space, I think China's claims on their two top machines are credible. The thing to keep in mind is that the Top 500 list is based on what is essentially a single number: HPL performance. That's not a good benchmark for sustained performance on real science/industry codes. So, are China's machines much faster in one benchmark of dubious value? Yes, quite probably. However, does the USA get more science out of their #4 machine than China's #1 machine? Also quite probable. However, how long will this lead in real sustained performance last? If China is already passing the USA in peak funny numbers, how long until they pass the USA on a more meaningful metric? Probably not too long, unless the USA actually tries hard to keep its lead.

  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday June 20 2017, @08:52PM (1 child)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Tuesday June 20 2017, @08:52PM (#528712) Journal

    If China is already passing the USA in peak funny numbers, how long until they pass the USA on a more meaningful metric? Probably not too long, unless the USA actually tries hard to keep its lead.

    Agreed. They'll get the job done if they want to. And rising in peak funny numbers isn't so bad - the computers are going to get better regardless of LINPACK, and the work they do on the computers is going to have real requirements like I/O bandwidth. Nobody builds a supercomputer simply to get on the list.

    World's fastest computer, Tianhe-2, might get very little use [scmp.com]

    China's newer supercomputers are using "homegrown" chips, which might affect the ability to program for it.

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    • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday June 21 2017, @03:23PM

      by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Wednesday June 21 2017, @03:23PM (#529053) Homepage
      > Nobody builds a supercomputer simply to get on the list.

      https://www.top500.org/system/173225
      Built, did some benchmarks, got on the list, got repurposed (notice it is only on one list, it never got pushed out, it simply disappeared).
      --
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