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The U.S. leads the June 2018 TOP500 list with a 122.3 petaflops system:
The TOP500 celebrates its 25th anniversary with a major shakeup at the top of the list. For the first time since November 2012, the US claims the most powerful supercomputer in the world, leading a significant turnover in which four of the five top systems were either new or substantially upgraded.
Summit, an IBM-built supercomputer now running at the Department of Energy's (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), captured the number one spot with a performance of 122.3 petaflops on High Performance Linpack (HPL), the benchmark used to rank the TOP500 list. Summit has 4,356 nodes, each one equipped with two 22-core Power9 CPUs, and six NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs. The nodes are linked together with a Mellanox dual-rail EDR InfiniBand network.
[...] Sierra, a new system at the DOE's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory took the number three spot, delivering 71.6 petaflops on HPL. Built by IBM, Sierra's architecture is quite similar to that of Summit, with each of its 4,320 nodes powered by two Power9 CPUs plus four NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs and using the same Mellanox EDR InfiniBand as the system interconnect.
The #100 system has an Rmax of 1.703 petaflops, up from 1.283 petaflops in November. The #500 system has an Rmax of 715.6 teraflops, up from 548.7 teraflops in June.
273 systems have a performance of at least 1 petaflops, up from 181 systems. The combined performance of the top 500 systems is 1.22 exaflops, up from 845 petaflops.
On the Green500 list, Shoubu system B's efficiency has been adjusted to 18.404 gigaflops per Watt from 17.009 GFLOPS/W. The Summit supercomputer, #1 on TOP500, debuts at #5 on the Green500 with 13.889 GFLOPS/W. Japan's AI Bridging Cloud Infrastructure (ABCI) supercomputer, #5 on TOP500 (19.88 petaflops Rmax), is #8 on the Green500 with 12.054 GFLOPS/W.
Previously: TOP500 List #50 and Green500 List #21: November 2017
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday June 26 2018, @04:41AM (3 children)
I didn't imply that 'we should have a single super-computer'. I was just making the point that we don't have one.
And I made this point to serve the context for the question "What use the 'total-compute-power' has if we don't actually have a single computer nor a single project that require the use of all computers?"
And it's a genuine question, no implication that we should or should not use the 'total-compute-power'.
I hope it's clearer now. And, as usual, any pertinent (to my mind) answer will get the deserved upmod from me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday June 26 2018, @04:50AM (2 children)
Why wouldn't we be interested in understanding the quantity of computing power available?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday June 26 2018, @05:06AM (1 child)
I don't know why I would not.
I don't know why I would, either.
This is why I asked, "what would be the use of this metric?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday June 26 2018, @11:14AM
For example, if you're thinking about building a machine that does computations that would be closely measured by the High Performance Linpack benchmark, this total would give you some idea of where your machine would stack up against current registered competition.
And who knows, there are real world problems that one can throw all that computing power at. Perhaps some day, one of those problems will become important enough to do so.