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posted by mrpg on Tuesday November 13 2018, @09:35AM   Printer-friendly
from the C=64 dept.

Upgraded US Supercomputers Claim top two Spots on Top500 List:

China has more of the 500 fastest machines on the planet than ever, and the US hits an all-time low.

The US now can claim the top two machines on a list of the 500 fastest supercomputers, as Sierra, an IBM machine for nuclear weapons research at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, edged out a Chinese system that last year was the very fastest.

The Top500 list ranks supercomputers based on how quickly they perform a mathematical calculation test called Linpack. The top machine, IBM's Summit at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, had claimed the No. 1 spot in June with a speed of 122.3 quintillion mathematical operations per second, or 122.3 petaflops.

But an upgrade gave it a score of 143.5 petaflops on the newest list. To match that speed, each person on the planet would have to perform 19 million calculations per second. Sierra got an upgrade, too, boosting its performance from 71.6 petaflops to 94.6 petaflops and lifting it from third place to second.

The top machine on the first TOP500 list in June of 1993 was a Thinking Machines Corporation CM-5/1024 with 1,024 cores and was rated at Rpeak of 131.0 GFlop/s and Rmax of 59.7 GFlop/s. The least performant system is listed at the bottom of Page 5 of he list was a C3840 Made by Sharp of Japan which had 4 cores and had RPeak and RMax scores of 0.5 and 0.4 GFlop/s respectively. The fasted Cray Research machine in 1993 rated 9th place at 15.2/13.7 GFlop/s for RPeak and RMax.

Where on that first list would today's smartphones land?

More at Top500 and The Register.


Original Submission

Summit and Sierra are siblings, each using IBM Power9 processors boosted by Nvidia Tesla V100 accelerator chips and connected with Mellanox high-speed Infiniband network connections. They're gargantuan machines made of row after row of refrigerator-size computing cabinets. Summit has 2.4 million processor cores and Sierra has 1.6 million.

[...] A total of 227 of the Top500 machines are in China, compared with an all-time low of 109 for the US. The November list is the 52nd one released by a collection of academic researchers who compile it twice yearly for supercomputing conferences.

Linpack is only one speed test, though, and the Top500 has another designed to capture a broader range of performance abilities, the High-Performance Conjugate Gradient (HPCG) benchmark. On it, Summit and Sierra are head and shoulders above competing supercomputers.

 
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