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posted by CoolHand on Friday May 06 2016, @08:27PM   Printer-friendly
from the mergers-that-make-sense dept.

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

Related Stories

Shoubu Supercomputer Tops Green500 List at Over 7 Gigaflops Per Watt 9 comments

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

TOP500 Supercomputer List for November 2015 Released, China Dominates 19 comments

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.]

China Plans Exascale Supercomputer for Deployment Around 2020 5 comments

New information has emerged about China's exascale plans, which are a part of China's 13th five-year plan for 2016-2020. Despite U.S.-imposed export restrictions on processors, two 100 petaflops systems will be launched sometime during 2016, possibly as soon as the 2016 International Supercomputing Conference in June. One of these systems will be an upgrade to Tianhe-2, and both may utilize homegrown accelerators.

At least one exascale prototype system will be built prior to a 1 exaflops system:

The exascale prototype will be about 512 nodes, offering 5-10 teraflops-per-node, 10-20 Gflops/watt, point to point bandwidth greater than 200 Gbps. MPI latency should be less than 1.5 µs, said [Beihang University Professor Depei] Qian. Development will also include system software and three typical applications that will be used to verify effectiveness. From there, work will begin on an efficient computing node and a scheme for high-performance processor/accelerator design.

"Based on those key technology developments, we will finally build the exascale system," said Qian. "Our goal is not so ambitious – it is to have exaflops in peak. We are looking for a LINPACK efficiency of greater than 60 percent. Memory is rather limited, about 10 petabytes, with exabyte levels of storage. We don't think we can reach the 20 megawatts system goal in less than five years so our goal is about 35 megawatts for the system; that means 30 Gflops/watt energy efficiency. The expected interconnect performance is greater than 500 Gbps."


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 Joe Desertrat on Saturday May 07 2016, @01:32AM

    by Joe Desertrat (2454) on Saturday May 07 2016, @01:32AM (#342771)

    But when the supercomputers start merging themselves it will be the beginning of the end.