HPCwire reports on an analysis of the November 2015 TOP500 Supercomputer list by co-creator Dr. Erich Strohmaier showing "nothing wrong with Moore's Law". Strohmaier examined China's jump in installed systems and performance growth trends.
China's surge is mainly attributed to "surprise company" Sugon, which submitted smaller sytems. It achieved 3rd place in vendor market share, but just 7th in terms of installed performance, with 21 petaflops. Strohmaier says that Sugon was new to supercomputing and took the time and energy to run the LINPACK benchmark across all systems, "regardless of how well or badly they run and gave us the number". Lenovo became a Chinese company, and some "artifact" systems were labelled Lenovo/IBM or IBM/Lenovo. Strohmaier also pointed to Inspur with 15 systems.
Strohmaier identifies two inflection points in TOP500 performance development. The growth trajectory dips in 2008 and 2014, showing the effects of financial and technology changes. Turnover has decreased since 2008, with 1.27 year old systems before 2008 and roughly 3 year old systems today. However, by filtering out systems with NVIDIA and Xeon Phi coprocessors, Strohmaier identified an Rmax/socket trend that continues to follow Moore's Law and is the product of the average number of cores per socket and the performance per core. Since the performance per socket continues to increase at an exponential rate, it is the lack of growth in total number of sockets that explains TOP500 stagnation. "So it's clearly a technological reason, but it's not a reason on a chip, it's actually a reason on the facility and system level that is most likely related to either power or money or both."
[More after the break.]
Strohmaier ends his presentation with a defense of LINPACK:
The final slide presented by Dr. Strohmaier plots the best application performance from the Gordon Bell prize that is awarded each year at SC with TOP500 to show correlation. Since these are different applications with potentially different systems, a close tracking between these two trends over time could be taken to suggest that the LINPACK is still a useful reflection of real world performance. This is something to dive deeper into another time, but for now, here is that slide
RIKEN's PEZY-based Shoubu supercomputer maintains its top spot on the Nov. 2015 Green500 list with an energy efficiency of 7.032 gigaflops per Watt. TSUBAME-KFC/DL at the Tokyo Institute of Technology made #2 with 5.332 GFLOPS/W due to a switch to NVIDIA Tesla K80 GPUs. A Chinese Sugon cluster at the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Modern Physics made it to #4 with 4.778 GFLOPS/W. Five nearly identical Chinese Inspur systems round off the top 10 with efficiency at or above 3.775 GFLOPS/W. The Inspur system sites are described as "Internet Service" and "IT Company".
Two Japanese "Suiren" systems at the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization have disappeared from the #2 and #3 spots and appear to have been merged into one, less efficient system that now appears at #12 on the Green500 list.
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The 46th edition of the TOP500 list of supercomputers has been released. While the familiar Tianhe-2 continues to lead the list with a performance of 33.86 petaflops, China has nearly tripled its representation within the top 500 systems, to 109 supercomputers today from just 37 in June. The United States has 200 systems on the list, down from 231 in June and the country's lowest share since the list was first published in 1993.
There are two new entrants within the top 10 systems. The U.S. Department of Energy's unfinished Trinity supercomputer debuts at #6 with a LINPACK of 8.1 petaflops. Trinity's performance is expected to grow to around 42.2 peak petaflops once Intel's Knights Landing Xeon Phi coprocessors are added in 2016. University of Stuttgart's High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS) has doubled the performance of Hazel-Hen. It is now a 5.6 petaflops system that reaches #8 on the list and is Germany's most powerful supercomputer, edging out the 5 petaflops JUQUEEN ranked at #11. Trinity and Hazel-Hen are both Cray XC systems, reflecting a recent resurgence in Cray Inc.'s representation on the list (now with a 24.9% share of total installed performance).
[More after the break.]
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
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"
The founder, President, and CEO of PEZY Computing, Motoaki Saito, has been arrested for allegedly defrauding the Japanese government:
The head of Japanese supercomputing firm PEZY Computing was arrested Tuesday on suspicion of defrauding a government institution of 431 million yen (~$3.8 million). According to reports in the Japanese press, PEZY founder, president and CEO Motoaki Saito and another PEZY employee, Daisuke Suzuki, are charged with profiting from padded claims they submitted to the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO).
On the 21st Green500 list, the top three most efficient supercomputers as well as the #5 most efficient supercomputer all use PEZY-SC2 "manycore" chips.
Previously: PEZY's Next Many-Core Chip Will Include a MIPS 64-Bit CPU
TOP500 Analysis Shows "Nothing Wrong with Moore's Law" and the November 2015 Green500 List
Shoubu Continues to Lead June 2016 Green500 List, World's Fastest Supercomputer Comes in at #3
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 23 2015, @10:17AM
Boring. Nobody needs faster anything to get to Facebook and Twitter. Moore's fucking law won't be an obedient little team player and fucking die already. Time to give Moore's Law the motherfucking death penalty. Come on Obama. Executive Order the fucking IT industry to stop making new shit that nobody fucking wants.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 23 2015, @10:30PM
Ignore large proportions of the results. If he's throwing away Phis and NVidias, then he's basically doctoring his stats. If you throw away all females apart from Brianne, and throw away the mountain, then the trend is that females on GoT are taller than males.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday November 23 2015, @11:39PM
But that's wrong. If the core count of regular Xeons or Opterons (used in Titan [wikipedia.org]) and performance per core are both increasing, multiplying them together gives you a performance trend that follows Moore's law.
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