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posted by CoolHand on Sunday August 02 2015, @01:20PM   Printer-friendly
from the binary-tree-hugging dept.

The June 2015 edition of the Green500 supercomputer list is finally out, and the top system, Shoubu at the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research (RIKEN) in Japan, has surpassed the 7 gigaflops per watt milestone. The following two systems surpassed 6 GFLOPS/W, and the current #4 system led the November 2014 list at 5.272 GFLOPS/W.

Shoubu is ranked #160 on the June 2015 edition of the TOP500 list, with an RMAX of 412.7 teraflops. Green500 reports its efficiency at 7,031.58 MFLOPS/W with a power consumption of 50.32 kW. The supercomputer uses Intel Xeon E5-2618Lv3 Haswell CPUs, "new many-core accelerators from PEZY-SC," and the InfiniBand data interconnect. The top 32 systems on the new Green500 list are heterogeneous, using GPU and "many-core" accelerators from the likes of AMD, Intel, NVIDIA, and PEZY Computing. The PEZY-SC accelerator used in the top 3 systems reportedly delivers 1.5 teraflops of double-precision floating-point performance using 1024 cores built on a 28nm process, while consuming just 90 W.

Green500 notes Japanese dominance in the supercomputer efficiency rankings. Aside from Shoubu at RIKEN, the #2 and #3 systems are located at the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) in Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan. Eight of the top twenty systems on the newest Green500 list are located in Japan.


Original Submission

Related Stories

PEZY's Next Many-Core Chip Will Include a MIPS 64-Bit CPU 6 comments

Intel's Knights-branded Xeon Phi chips remain the most familiar "many-core" accelerators or coprocessors. However, another name has emerged recently: PEZY, whose 1,024-core chips were used in the top 3 most efficient supercomputers. Tom's Hardware reports that PEZY's next generation of chips will boost the core count to 4,096 and integrate Imagination's 64-bit MIPS Warrior CPU onto a system-on-a-chip:

PEZY Computing, a Japanese firm that makes the top three most efficient supercomputers in the world, according to the Green500 list, announced that it will integrate Imagination's highly efficient 64-bit I6400 CPUs into its many-core architecture.

The PEZY SC-2 will be PEZY's next-generation system, which will increase the 1024 core count of the first generation PEZY SC to 4096 cores, or four times more. PEZY's many-core accelerator has been combined with Intel CPUs from top supercomputers to significantly increase their efficiency for computing tasks. For instance, the Shoubo supercomputer, which uses Haswell XEON CPUs and PEZY SC many-core accelerators, was able to break the world record with 7 GFLOPS/W performance.

In the November edition of Green500, the top 23 supercomputers used a heterogeneous architecture with many-core accelerators. In the updated June edition of this year, that number increased by 40 percent, and now the top 32 supercomputers are using many-core accelerators. These supercomputers all use accelerators from AMD, Intel, Nvidia and PEZY. The current top 3 supercomputers are manufactured by PEZY Computing and Exascaler Inc, and include Haswell or Ivy Bridge Xeons as well as PEZY many-core accelerators.

Presumably the integration of the MIPS CPU could allow relatively power-hungry Intel Xeons to be ditched entirely.

Previously: MIPS Strikes Back: 64-bit Warrior I6400 Arrives


Original Submission

TOP500 and Green500 Lists to "Merge" 1 comment

The TOP500 and Green500 lists, measuring the fastest and most power efficient supercomputers respectively, are to be "merged" beginning in June 2016:

The TOP500 and Green500 lists will continue to remain separate, but all submission data will now be collected via a single online portal at http://top500.org/submit. Submission instructions are to be found on both the TOP500 and Green500 sites. The joint power submission rules are now online.

Going forward, the ISC Group will host and maintain the web presence of Green500, which is currently undergoing a re-design to reflect the integration. The new site will be officially launched at the ISC High Performance conference in Frankfurt, Germany this June. The 47th TOP500 list, and the 19th Green500 list, will be presented in a historical ceremony during this year's conference opening session.

While the TOP500 list has included estimated supercomputer power consumption for years, allowing you to perform a FLOPS/Watt calculation, the Green500 list has apparently used a different set of stricter rules. Both lists will now use the same joint power submission rules.

The integration of the two lists reflects the growing importance of power efficiency in supercomputing. The ideal target for the first 1 exaflops supercomputing systems is around 20-25 megawatts, but the first system may end up with a total power consumption of around 35 megawatts.

Here's our November 2015 TOP500 and Green500 reporting.


Original Submission

Shoubu Continues to Lead June 2016 Green500 List, World's Fastest Supercomputer Comes in at #3 6 comments

The Shoubu supercomputer at RIKEN in Japan continues to lead the Green500 supercomputer efficiency list, but at a lower power efficiency than previously measured now that more processors have been added. Power consumption of Shoubu has tripled from 50.32 kW to 150 kW, and efficiency has declined from 7.03158 gigaflops per Watt to 6.67384 gigaflops per Watt. Say goodbye to that 7 GFLOPS/W milestone for a little while.

Another system at RIKEN, Satsuki, has taken the #2 spot, with 6.19522 GFLOPS/W. Both of these RIKEN supercomputers use Intel Xeon CPUs and PEZY-SCnp "manycore" accelerators. The world's fastest supercomputer, China's Sunway TaihuLight, takes the #3 spot at 6.0513 GFLOPS/W. That supercomputer solely uses a homegrown 260-core processor and consumes a total of 15.371 MW of power.

Despite little movement near the top of the list, there are many new entries this time around:

The Satsuki and TaihuLight supercomputers are the only new entries in the top 10. Overall, there are 157 new systems in the June 2016 edition of the Green500, representing nearly a third of the list. Aside from those systems mentioned, the remaining seven supercomputers in the top 10 use GPUs as accelerators paired with Xeon CPUs. The most energy-efficient systems continue to be dominated by heterogeneous systems like these. In the current list, 40 of the top 50 systems employ some sort of accelerator.

[...] China has 21 of the top 50 greenest supercomputers, while the US claims 8 such systems. Germany has 5 of the top 50 systems, with Japan and France each claiming 4 systems. Looking at the entire list, China has 168 systems, the US has 165, Japan has 29, Germany has 26, and France has 18.

The average energy efficiency in the current list is 1116.8 MFLOPS/Watt or a little over 1 GFLOPS/Watt. While Shoubu, the greenest supercomputer, is more than 6 times as efficient as the average, the goal of a 20 MW exaflop system would require an energy efficiency of 50 GFLOPS/Watt. Using the current trend line, the first 20 MW supercomputer capable of an exaflop would not appear until after 2022.

The TOP500 and Green500 lists have "merged", but the old site is being maintained.

Previously: Shoubu Supercomputer Tops Green500 List at Over 7 Gigaflops Per Watt
TOP500 Analysis Shows "Nothing Wrong with Moore's Law" and the November 2015 Green500 List
TOP500 and Green500 Lists to "Merge"


Original Submission

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  • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Sunday August 02 2015, @01:23PM

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Sunday August 02 2015, @01:23PM (#216999) Journal
    For the metric-impaired, how many bogomips does 7 gigaflops make?
    (grin)
    --
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 02 2015, @07:54PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 02 2015, @07:54PM (#217089)

      1 1/4 LoCs as long as they stay with the VW bug compatible seats.

  • (Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday August 02 2015, @05:32PM

    by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Sunday August 02 2015, @05:32PM (#217043) Homepage Journal

    The proposed petaflop box - China? - was posted to Soylent the other day. Sixty megawatts.

    How much does sixty megawatts costs over the useful lifetime of a petaflop?

    How much power would a green two petaflop box consume?

    Look my very-first generation non-retina iPad doesn't even have 3G yet it is faster and has more memory than a ten million dollars Cray 1. Supercomputers dont lose all will to live then commit suicide when some other box claims the "I'm Feeling Faster" button at Google.

    Faster boxen have important applications but you can publish in the Physical Review if your numerical theory is falsifiable by experiment. For particle physics that's six sigma.

    There is lots of useful physics I could do on the Xeon box I aseembled myself from componentsbI purchased at Central Computer.

    --
    Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
    • (Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Sunday August 02 2015, @05:50PM

      by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Sunday August 02 2015, @05:50PM (#217046) Journal

      The sixty megawatt number was one interviewee's guess at how much power a 1 exaflops supercomputer might consume. As I wrote in my comment [soylentnews.org], it isn't a very realistic target.

      20-25 MW is the actual target. 50-60 MW is worst case scenario territory. If some nation makes a 50-60 MW supercomputer just to get to 1 exaflops first, then blame it on bragging rights, because that's terribly high.

      To get a 25 megawatt 1 exaflops supercomputer, you need efficiency of 40 gigaflops per watt. We were at 5.271 GFLOPS/W, now we are at 7.032 GFLOPS/W. The Green500 is turning out to be a much more interesting list than TOP500. Now we need about a further 6-fold improvement in total system efficiency to meet the exascale targets. These efficient systems can scale, as Piz Daint, now #13 on the Green500, shows.

      About China: they plan to upgrade Tianhe-2 (power consumption currently at 17.8 megawatts) with a "homegrown accelerator" [soylentnews.org]. The upgrade will tack on another megawatt of power consumption but could increase peak performance to 100 petaflops.

      There is also the possibility for complete disruption of performance/power scaling. Here's the company to watch [optalysys.com].

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      • (Score: 3, Informative) by AnonTechie on Sunday August 02 2015, @07:30PM

        by AnonTechie (2275) on Sunday August 02 2015, @07:30PM (#217072) Journal

        Related to this topic: Computing at full capacity: http://phys.org/news/2015-08-full-capacity.html [phys.org]

        Over 12 million servers in 3 million data centers in the U.S. burn about 100 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity every year. Billions of dollars are spent on data center energy every year, with billions more spent on power distribution and cooling infrastructures. Even with the magnitude of these numbers, energy and cooling represent only about 20 percent of the typical total cost of ownership of data centers, which is typically dominated by server hardware (about 40 percent) and software (about 25 percent) costs. Additional costs, including storage, networking, and information technology labor, further swell the price tag.

        [Source]: http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2015/jisto-computing-at-full-capacity-0731 [mit.edu]

        --
        Albert Einstein - "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 02 2015, @09:19PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 02 2015, @09:19PM (#217108)

        omg! thanks a bunch! this video is really cool : ) http://optalysys.com/technology/watch-video/ [optalysys.com]

        • (Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday August 02 2015, @10:14PM

          by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Sunday August 02 2015, @10:14PM (#217128) Journal

          http://www.hpcwire.com/2014/08/06/exascale-breakthrough-weve-waiting/ [hpcwire.com]
          http://www.hpcwire.com/off-the-wire/tgac-and-optalysys-collaborate-to-reduce-hpc-energy-consumption/ [hpcwire.com]
          http://www.theplatform.net/2015/03/25/a-light-approach-to-genomics-with-optical-processors/ [theplatform.net]

          It's early but it could become a big deal... as long as it's not vaporware. It's also unclear whether this is a coprocessor, can work on all or at least many problems, and could be useful in anyway for home/gaming users. If it delivers a few 95% power reductions, people will start taking notice.

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          [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
        • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 02 2015, @11:47PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 02 2015, @11:47PM (#217155)

          Video is a 13 months old as of this writing. More interestingly, and no one here brought up nor in the comments of the video itself, is that this appears, at least to me, to be an optical ANALOG computer:

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_computer [wikipedia.org]

          The give-away in the video the explanation of how it works, translating digital data into analog waveforms riding the light, running it through some optics, and then turning it back to digital signals again--no quantum-anything, nor does this seem to be a digital photonic computer with optical transistors and the like. The huge difference from previous analog computers, besides the optics, is that the whole thing is on a single die, if I'm understanding right.

          Since the (vast?) majority of supercomputer simulations involve analog phenomena, particularly fluidics, going to analog computers makes sense; I could possibly see this not working down at the quantum level, though, but that's just a guess from this armchair quarterback.

          I also remember years ago I came across a Russian processor manufacturer's web site talking about how they never gave up on analog computers "unlike the West" and their computers could outperform Western ones, at least at certain things. I never saw it after that, nor saw it mentioned anywhere else, but I find it interesting that what is old is now new again under a different name, yet again.

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by opinionated_science on Sunday August 02 2015, @07:39PM

      by opinionated_science (4031) on Sunday August 02 2015, @07:39PM (#217079)

      with respect, there is much *more* useful physics, chemistry, biology, biochemisty etc... .with the computational sciences. The scaling to supercomputer scale, permits the solving of untypical problems, but sometimes you need to go fishing in the "out there" regions to find interesting stuff.

      I am a regular supercomputer user and I can assure you that getting a result in 1 week rather than 1 year, makes huge difference - so long as you are solving a problem you need!!!

      I also use my pencil and paper to do much of the foundational maths...