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posted by martyb on Tuesday June 20 2017, @03:34PM   Printer-friendly
from the Is-that-a-Cray-in-your-pocket? dept.

A new list was published on top500.org. It might be noteworthy that the NSA, Google, Amazon, Microsoft etc. are not submitting information to this list. Currently, the top two places are occupied by China, with a comfortable 400% head-start in peak-performance and 370% Rmax performance to the 3rd place (Switzerland). US appears on rank 4, Japan on rank 7, and Germany is not in the top ten at all.

All operating systems in the top-10 are Linux and derivates. It seems obvious that, since it is highly optimized hardware, only operating systems are viable which can be fine-tune (so, either open source or with vendor-support for such customizations). Still I would have thought that, since a lot of effort needs to be invested anyway, maybe other systems (BSD?) could be equally suited to the task.

RankSiteSystemCoresRmax (TFlop/s)Rpeak (TFlop/s)Power (kW)
1China: National Supercomputing Center in WuxiSunway TaihuLight - Sunway MPP, Sunway SW26010 260C 1.45GHz, Sunway - NRCPC10,649,60093,014.6125,435.915,371
2China: National Super Computer Center in GuangzhouTianhe-2 (MilkyWay-2) - TH-IVB-FEP Cluster, Intel Xeon E5-2692 12C 2.200GHz, TH Express-2, Intel Xeon Phi 31S1P - NUDT3,120,00033,862.754,902.417,808
3Switzerland: Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS)Piz Daint - Cray XC50, Xeon E5-2690v3 12C 2.6GHz, Aries interconnect , NVIDIA Tesla P100 - Cray Inc.361,76019,590.025,326.32,272
4U.S.: DOE/SC/Oak Ridge National LaboratoryTitan - Cray XK7, Opteron 6274 16C 2.200GHz, Cray Gemini interconnect, NVIDIA K20x - Cray Inc.560,64017,590.027,112.58,209
5U.S.: DOE/NNSA/LLNLSequoia - BlueGene/Q, Power BQC 16C 1.60 GHz, Custom - IBM1,572,86417,173.220,132.77,890
6U.S.: DOE/SC/LBNL/NERSCCori - Cray XC40, Intel Xeon Phi 7250 68C 1.4GHz, Aries interconnect - Cray Inc.622,33614,014.727,880.73,939
7Japan: Joint Center for Advanced High Performance ComputingOakforest-PACS - PRIMERGY CX1640 M1, Intel Xeon Phi 7250 68C 1.4GHz, Intel Omni-Path - Fujitsu556,10413,554.624,913.52,719
8Japan: RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science (AICS)K computer, SPARC64 VIIIfx 2.0GHz, Tofu interconnect - Fujitsu705,02410,510.011,280.412,660
9U.S.: DOE/SC/Argonne National LaboratoryMira - BlueGene/Q, Power BQC 16C 1.60GHz, Custom - IBM786,4328,586.610,066.33,945
10U.S.: DOE/NNSA/LANL/SNLTrinity - Cray XC40, Xeon E5-2698v3 16C 2.3GHz, Aries interconnect - Cray Inc.301,0568,100.911,078.94,233

takyon: TSUBAME3.0 leads the Green500 list with 14.110 gigaflops per Watt. Piz Daint is #3 on the TOP500 and #6 on the Green500 list, at 10.398 gigaflops per Watt.

According to TOP500, this is only the second time in the history of the list that the U.S. has not secured one of the top 3 positions.

The #100 and #500 positions on June 2017's list have an Rmax of 1.193 petaflops and 432.2 teraflops respectively. Compare to 1.0733 petaflops and 349.3 teraflops for the November 2016 list.

[Update: Historical lists can be found on https://www.top500.org/lists/. There was a time when you only needed 0.4 gigaflops to make the original Top500 list — how do today's mobile phones compare? --martyb]


Original Submission

Related Stories

TOP500 List #50 and Green500 List #21: November 2017 17 comments

The fiftieth TOP500 list has been released. Although there has been little change at the top of the list, China now dominates the list in terms of the number of systems, rising to 202 from 160 in June, with the U.S. falling to 143 systems from 169. However, this seems to be the result of Chinese vendors pushing more commercial systems to get on the list:

An examination of the new systems China is adding to the list indicates concerted efforts by Chinese vendors Inspur, Lenovo, Sugon and more recently Huawei to benchmark loosely coupled Web/cloud systems that strain the definition of HPC. To wit, 68 out of the 96 systems that China introduced onto the latest list utilize 10G networking and none are deployed at research sites. The benchmarking of Internet and telecom systems for Top500 glory is not new. You can see similar fingerprints on the list (current and historical) from HPE and IBM, but China has doubled down. For comparison's sake, the US put 19 new systems on the list and eight of those rely on 10G networking. [...] Snell provided additional perspective: "What we're seeing is a concerted effort to list systems in China, particularly from China-based system vendors. The submission rules allow for what is essentially benchmarking by proxy. If Linpack is run and verified on one system, the result can be assumed for other systems of the same (or greater) configuration, so it's possible to put together concerted efforts to list more systems, whether out of a desire to show apparent market share, or simply for national pride."

Sunway TaihuLight continues to lead the list at just over 93 petaflops. The Gyoukou supercomputer has jumped from #69 (~1.677 petaflops) in the June list to #4 (~19.136 petaflops). Due to its use of PEZY "manycore" processors, Gyoukou is now the supercomputer with the highest number of cores in the list's history (19,860,000). The Trinity supercomputer has been upgraded with Xeon Phi processors, more than tripling the core count and bringing performance to ~14.137 petaflops (#7) from ~8.1 petaflops (#10). Each of the top 10 supercomputers now has a measured LINPACK performance of at least 10 petaflops.

The #100 system has an Rmax of 1.283 petaflops, up from 1.193 petaflops in June. The #500 system has an Rmax of 548.7 teraflops, up from 432.2 teraflops in June. 181 systems have a performance of at least 1 petaflops, up from 138 systems. The combined peformance of the top 500 systems is 845 petaflops, up from 749 petaflops.

Things are a little more interesting on the Green500 list. The Shoubu system B has an efficiency of 17.009 gigaflops per Watt, up from TSUBAME3.0's 14.11 GFLOPS/W at the #1 position in June (TSUBAME3.0 quadrupled its performance while its efficiency dipped to 13.704 GFLOPS/W (#6) on the new list). The top 4 systems all exceed 15 GFLOPS/W. #5 on the Green500 list is Gyoukou, which is #4 on the TOP500. Piz Daint is hanging in there at #10 on the Green500 list and #3 on the TOP500.

All of the new top 3 systems on the Green500 list (and Gyoukou at #5) use the PEZY-SC2 manycore processor. The SC2 has 2,048 cores and 8 threads per core, and has a single-precision peak performance of about 8.192 TFLOPS. Each SC2 also includes six MIPS management cores, making it possible to eliminate the need for an Intel Xeon host processor, although that has not been done in any of the new systems.

At 17 GFLOPS/W, it would take about 58.8 megawatts to power a 1 exaflops supercomputer. 20-25 MW is the preferred power level for initial exascale systems, although we may see a 40 MW system.

Previously: New List of TOP500 Supercomputers [Updated]


Original Submission

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  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 20 2017, @03:52PM (12 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 20 2017, @03:52PM (#528525)

    You learn something new every day.

    • (Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday June 20 2017, @03:59PM (1 child)

      by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday June 20 2017, @03:59PM (#528531)

      You'll never find computing so fast or bureaucracy so slow, the contrast is always amusing.

      • (Score: 2) by BsAtHome on Tuesday June 20 2017, @04:32PM

        by BsAtHome (889) on Tuesday June 20 2017, @04:32PM (#528562)

        It is probably a reciprocal relation.

    • (Score: 3, Funny) by DannyB on Tuesday June 20 2017, @04:23PM (4 children)

      by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday June 20 2017, @04:23PM (#528552) Journal

      Government's role is NOT supercomputing.

      Government's role is snooping on its citizens. For prevention and early discovery of thought crime.

      Supercomputers are merely a means to that necessary end. It's for our own good.

      Plus, supercomputers can help with weather forecasting.

      --
      People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
      • (Score: 2) by NewNic on Tuesday June 20 2017, @05:05PM (3 children)

        by NewNic (6420) on Tuesday June 20 2017, @05:05PM (#528587) Journal

        Plus, supercomputers can help with weather forecasting.

        What do you think #5 on the list is mostly used for? I'll give you a clue: it's not for weather forecasting.

        --
        lib·er·tar·i·an·ism ˌlibərˈterēənizəm/ noun: Magical thinking that useful idiots mistake for serious political theory
        • (Score: 3, Funny) by DannyB on Tuesday June 20 2017, @05:32PM (1 child)

          by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday June 20 2017, @05:32PM (#528605) Journal

          Department of Energy doesn't sound so scary. What could they possibly model, involving enormous amounts of energy, that could be more important than weather? And no need to model on supercomputers. Just do above ground tests in New Jersey.

          --
          People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
          • (Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday June 21 2017, @04:34PM

            by DeathMonkey (1380) on Wednesday June 21 2017, @04:34PM (#529092) Journal

            Quiet you fool!

            Our only hope is that Rick Perry never finds out that he's in charge of the nukes!

        • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 20 2017, @08:38PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 20 2017, @08:38PM (#528703)

          What do you think #5 on the list is mostly used for? I'll give you a clue: it's not for weather forecasting.

          Is that the DOE's email server?

    • (Score: 2) by NewNic on Tuesday June 20 2017, @04:54PM (4 children)

      by NewNic (6420) on Tuesday June 20 2017, @04:54PM (#528583) Journal

      Never realized Government's role is supercomputing

      Because you don't need supercomputers to do things like model nuclear reactions in bombs or provide weather and climate predictions.

      No, of course governments doesn't need supercomputers. I'm sure the Koch Brothers will provide one any day now. </sarcasm>

      Idiot!

      --
      lib·er·tar·i·an·ism ˌlibərˈterēənizəm/ noun: Magical thinking that useful idiots mistake for serious political theory
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 20 2017, @05:17PM (2 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 20 2017, @05:17PM (#528592)

        What would we be without government? Just a bunch of cave-dwelling Neanderthals, minding our own business.

        • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday June 20 2017, @05:36PM (1 child)

          by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday June 20 2017, @05:36PM (#528606) Journal

          No. We would do what we've always done. Divide into two groups. The cave dwelling Neanderthals minding their own business. And the Neanderthals that realize it's easier to steal other people's food than hunt / grow your own. And they can copulate with the peaceful group's women without having to deal with any of the consequences.

          Thus begins the emergence of laws and government and two party system.

          --
          People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
          • (Score: 3, Funny) by edIII on Tuesday June 20 2017, @06:19PM

            by edIII (791) on Tuesday June 20 2017, @06:19PM (#528626)

            You seem to imply that Trump is a violent aggressive Neanderthal that lies and steals, and then just walks up to peaceful Neanderthal women and grabs them by their pussy....

            Yeah, I think your analogy works out just fine :)

            --
            Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
      • (Score: 2) by edIII on Tuesday June 20 2017, @06:28PM

        by edIII (791) on Tuesday June 20 2017, @06:28PM (#528633)

        Ohhh, with Orange Anus fully on board with the Republican position that Climate Change doesn't exist, and our exit from the Paris agreement, weather prediction and modeling just got a lot easier.

        It's going to be hotter. There's your 100 year forecast :)

        --
        Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday June 20 2017, @03:58PM (1 child)

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday June 20 2017, @03:58PM (#528529)

    maybe other systems (BSD?) could be equally suited to the task

    Interconnect hardware drivers. Its not Dad's old fast-ethernet switch. You have to get pretty far down the list to find COTS infiniband which is Freebsd supported (lots of the storage vendors support it). I would be surprised if "Cray Linux Environment" has been ported to freebsd WRT hardware driver support.

    There's a long list of cluster geographic locations but if Cray and to a lesser extent IBM decide not to ship FreeBSD thats a huge chunk of the list. Essentially you're asking "why is the list dominated by one company" with a side dish of "why does one company arbitrarily prefer one thing over another".

    So the process is hand coded assembly or Fortran running under linux served by giant BSD powered commercial NAS, well, its kinda *BSD?

    In the REALLY old days it was just social-network effect where the first Beowulf was etc etc ...

    • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Wednesday June 21 2017, @08:46AM

      by TheRaven (270) on Wednesday June 21 2017, @08:46AM (#528930) Journal
      That doesn't matter much, because most of the kernel drivers for this kind of hardware are trivial: they map a bit of device memory into userspace. Some of them don't even have kernel device drivers, they just map something from /dev/kmem. The OS on these things is there as a program loader and a thing that gets out of the way. Any CPU time spent in the OS is time not spent doing useful work. Individual nodes are typically running one single job and the scheduler is often hacked up to run in a purely cooperative mode. On some of the IBM systems, the Linux part is largely there as an I/O coprocessor running on an anaemic PowerPC core, and all of the real compute runs on the accelerator.

      IBM used to use a proprietary BSD derivative, but switched to Linux because of the brand recognition. Talking to a friend who runs a few of these at Argonne, they're not even particularly interested in clever OpenMP runtimes for the same reason: the job of the OS and OpenMP runtime is to get out of the way while the carefully optimised code runs. If your OpenMP task scheduler is a bit more clever, you'll still probably lose overall from spending more CPU time in it (this may change with more accelerators, if you can designate a CPU core to running profiling and scheduling tasks and run all of the real work on more throughput-optimised cores).

      --
      sudo mod me up
  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 20 2017, @03:58PM (9 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 20 2017, @03:58PM (#528530)
    I hope Cray doesn't get pissed off and fire me for this:

    I work as an engineer at Cray Inc., and I would be willing to answer questions about the Top 500 list as well as Cray, with the understanding that the responses are all my own opinions and do not represent Cray's position in any official way whatsoever. I'm only responding as an individual, not as a Cray employee representing the company.

    That said, I've personally run a number of codes on the Titan supercomputer in particular, as well as a number of other large Cray machines. I am bound by certain NDAs, but I'm happy to share whatever I can, as appropriate.

    Please, feel free to ask me anything; I'll be back on later after work, and try to answer some Qs.
    • (Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday June 20 2017, @04:02PM (1 child)

      by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday June 20 2017, @04:02PM (#528535)

      Y U no *BSD?

      My guess, from purely public non-NDA sources, is your interconnect driver code is more complicated than a cut-paste-compile job although theoretically you could BSD if you wanted.

      With a side dish of license problems where GPL means people have to share advances and BSD doesn't require it, so naturally linux will develop faster (for good or in the case of systemd cancer, bad)

      • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 20 2017, @04:12PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 20 2017, @04:12PM (#528546)

        Y U no *BSD? [...]

        I can't be sure. If I were to hazard a guess, it would be that Cray has already invested a lot in Linux. Cray uses the Cray Linux Environment (CLE 5.2 [cray.com]) on its supercomputer line (Cray has a cluster product lineup as well, which provides more software flexibility to customers), which I think is currently based on SLES 11 SP3. While I don't personally know of any technical reason that BSD couldn't be made to work, it would probably take a lot of money and effort to switch.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 20 2017, @04:40PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 20 2017, @04:40PM (#528574)

      Doesn't "Piz Daint Cray" sound like something you'd hear on the streets of Philadelphia?

      Seriously now, how do you design software and toolchains to take advantage of a large number of cores? Do you need to use specialized languages?

      How do you manage I/O? I/O is a bottleneck in desktop computing, so it must be a serious consideration in supercomputing.

      How hot does the room get when you have all of those cores running at once? If you wanted to build a supercomputer that could run at room temperature with minimal air conditioning, how big a performance hit would you have to take?

      • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 20 2017, @06:32PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 20 2017, @06:32PM (#528636)

        [...] how do you design software and toolchains to take advantage of a large number of cores? Do you need to use specialized languages?

        How do you manage I/O? I/O is a bottleneck in desktop computing, so it must be a serious consideration in supercomputing.

        How hot does the room get when you have all of those cores running at once? If you wanted to build a supercomputer that could run at room temperature with minimal air conditioning, how big a performance hit would you have to take?

        1) A lot can be done with fairly standard languages. Fortran does very well in the HPC (high-performance computing) space. Many younger people think of Fortran as an outdated dinosaur, but this couldn't be further from the truth. Fortran is a modern language with features such as various kinds of closure, object oriented support, and much, much more. Now, I don't personally care for some aspects of the syntax, but Fortran is no dog. In fact, due to the way that arrays in Fortran are first class language constructs (unlike C where everything is just a bare pointer to a chunk of memory and an offset), Fortran code often (nearly always) outperforms other languages like C and C++. This is because more information is available for the computer to use during optimization. The compiler just can't "see" as much of what's going on in C code, with bare pointers all over the place. That said, more and more HPC codes are being written or "ported" to C/C++ now than ever before. C and C++ work just fine on supercomputers as long as the code is very carefully written. Start with MPI and OpenMP in Fortran or plain C if you want to get started the easiest way possible for programming supercomputers. The fun part is, you can even run thse MPI+OMP codes on your home desktop to test them out (at a tiny scale). -- That said, there are many custom languages, frameworks, libraries, etc. available on these machines, if one feels like getting really fancy.

        2) I/O is a big issue. Cray tends to use the Lustre parallel filesystem on their machines, but other supercomputers use different parallel filesystems like GPFS. If you've ever setup a NFS server, you can think of what supercomputers use as the same basic idea, but "on steroids". One filesystem will span many servers and many disks, so as to provide a high level of parallelism to the highly parallel application code. Cray also offers nodes with "Burst Buffers", which are just SSDs sitting on the compute nodes along with some nice software to expose these to the compute processes in an easy to use way. That said, I should make a comment for those not in the HPC space: the best way to avoid I/O is not to do it. So, at supercomputer scales, many people take the stance that nothing should touch disk unless it has to. So, data is not passed around in temp files on disk. Instead, data is communicated directly between compute nodes, in memory, using the high-speed interconnect whenever possible. I/O is a large and complicated subject, and I'm just scratching the surface here.

        3) I'm going to guess that this is mostly a cost issue, and a lot of it comes down to compute density, in terms of floor space in the datacenter. If you have air cooling, that's not really a problem per se, but then the same amount of compute power will take more floor space, because it can't be as dense and still be cooled as well as if it were liquid cooled. So, there's no performance reason, really, that things are liquid cooled, it's just that you can get denser, and this can use a smaller datacenter footprint to get the same performance. Remember that the datacenter can at times cost just as much if not more than a machine (depending on the machine and datacenter in question).

    • (Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday June 20 2017, @05:05PM (2 children)

      by LoRdTAW (3755) on Tuesday June 20 2017, @05:05PM (#528588) Journal

      I have a few:
      1) What's next in terms of supercomputing hardware? Are we still building what amounts to a Intel PC with a video card and a fancy interconnect? Or will we see more exotic hardware like those Google AI chips or the proposed DARPA CPU: https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=17/06/12/1959259 [soylentnews.org]? What about Xeon PHI's, Arm, AMD, GPU/APU, FPGA, or ASIC's?

      2) What bottlenecks do you currently have to deal with and how do you get around them? e.g. I/O, bandwidth, storage, Memory, CPU/GPU/Etc?

      3) Is AI becoming a factor in supercomputing?

      4) Lastly, Outside of AI and large government research projects, do you see any future applications for supercomputers?

      • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 20 2017, @06:09PM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 20 2017, @06:09PM (#528619)

        1) What's next in terms of supercomputing hardware? Are we still building what amounts to a Intel PC with a video card and a fancy interconnect? Or will we see more exotic hardware like those Google AI chips or the proposed DARPA CPU: https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=17/06/12/1959259 [soylentnews.org] [soylentnews.org]? What about Xeon PHI's, Arm, AMD, GPU/APU, FPGA, or ASIC's?

        2) What bottlenecks do you currently have to deal with and how do you get around them? e.g. I/O, bandwidth, storage, Memory, CPU/GPU/Etc?

        3) Is AI becoming a factor in supercomputing?

        4) Lastly, Outside of AI and large government research projects, do you see any future applications for supercomputers?

        1) I have to mostly recuse myself from this particular question due to NDA concerns. However, I could perhaps point you to coverage of a recent announcement from the US government on funding for exascale research: Six Exascale PathForward Vendors Selected; DoE Providing $258M [hpcwire.com]. I could also say that Moore's Law and Dennard Scaling are showing signs of slowing down. This means that easy performance gains from scaling to a smaller manufacturing node (making transistors smaller) are not coming in like they used to. This means that there may be a little more room for doing some clever hardware designing instead of just scaling the same old things down. This may also mean there is a little more room to get a real HPC-oriented CPU instead of just commodity/server parts, just maybe. -- Cray does currently sell systems with the Xeon PHI: consider Cori, #6 on the list.

        2) Yes. All of those are issues, and they all matter. If I were to pick one to focus on, I would probably pick the interconnect. I would say something like: a large number of CPUs in the same room does not a supercomputer make. That's just a lot of individual computers. To make a true supercomputer, you need to be able to have all those tens of thousands of CPUs working together on the same problem. This requires a very high-bandwidth and low-latency interconnect. Cray has historically placed a very strong emphasis on the interconnect, and Cray has created several custom interconnects in the past when commodity parts were simply not good enough. Today, one can limp along with EDR InfiniBand and do OK on the smaller end of the supercomputer market. At the top end, IB gets very expensive actually. Cray's Aries interconnect still holds its own on real world workloads, despite being a smidge old now. I can't comment on if or when Cray plans to introduce a new interconnect as a follow on to Aries. In addition to tackling the communications issues by using a high-performance interconnect, a lot of work is also done on the software side. Cray has an optimized MPI library (if you want to learn to drive a supercomputer, learn MPI and OMP), and decades of experience scaling and optimizing codes. To give just one tip, always write your code to overlap communication and computation as much as possible. That is, initiate some communication, do some other work without waiting for the comms to finish, then finally wait for confirmation that the previously initiated communication has completed only after you've done said computation. Writing good code which does a good job of this comm/comp overlap, where possible, is a good place to start.

        (3) Yes. While NVIDIA likes to tell stories about being able to put a "supercomputer on a desk" or make a "supercomputer fit in a PCIe slot", people actually in the HPC (High Performance Computing) industry tend to laugh at this in private. While Deep Learning / Machine Learning does run very well on GPUs, a computer with 16 GPUs is not a supercomputer. Consider that Piz Daint, #3 on the list, has 5,320 P100 GPUs. Cray is actually uniquely positioned to have some of the highest-performing Deep Learning training runs in the world take place on some machines they've built. This has a lot to do with the interconnect and communications stack, but that's not Cray's only advantage here. Note that the size of the Deep Neural Networks in use in industry is increasing. These nets and their training data sets are growing very quickly, and soon, they may not fit well on small machines that can't scale efficiently to 1000s of nodes, whether each of those nodes is a CPU, GPU, or other accelerator.

        (4) Yes. Actually, I'm very bullish about the future of the supercomputing market, particularly in the commercial (non-gov) space. More and more companies are increasing their investment and reliance on computing in general, and this is also true at the high end of the market. From oil and gas (reservoir simulation) to traditional manufacturing (CFD, etc.), supercomputing is no longer solely an activity of national governments. While the largest machines may continue to be owned by governments, more and more companies are realizing the competitive advantages that can come from effective utilization of true supercomputer-class machines.

    • (Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday June 20 2017, @08:35PM (1 child)

      by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Tuesday June 20 2017, @08:35PM (#528700) Journal

      What's your take on the new storage and memory technologies?

      Examples:

      High Bandwidth Memory
      Hybrid Memory Cube
      GDDR6/GDDR5X/DDR5
      3D QLC NAND
      NAND with 64-96 layers
      Intel/Micron 3D XPoint (the only significant post-NAND technology to make it to market)

      and last but probably least,

      helium-filled shingled magnetic recording hard drives (because HAMR is nowhere to be found)

      --
      [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
      • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 21 2017, @12:27AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 21 2017, @12:27AM (#528807)

        What's your take on the new storage and memory technologies?
        Examples:
        High Bandwidth Memory
        Hybrid Memory Cube
        GDDR6/GDDR5X/DDR5
        3D QLC NAND
        NAND with 64-96 layers
        Intel/Micron 3D XPoint (the only significant post-NAND technology to make it to market)

        and last but probably least,

        helium-filled shingled magnetic recording hard drives (because HAMR is nowhere to be found)

        Memory with a high bandwidth (and a low latency) is becoming more and more critical in HPC. CPU core performance has, for some time now, been increasing faster than memory performance. That is, it's getting harder and harder to keep the cores fed with data. This is often more true for HPC (high-performance computing) workloads than for workloads in many other spaces. Now, there are different technologies which attempt to deliver this bandwidth (don't forget latency) as you point out. I wish I could say more here, but I can't due to NDA concerns. However, perhaps I could paint a very rough picture from publicly available information. HBM ("High Bandwidth Memory") is good stuff compared to DDR, and HBM2+ is better. There are some concerns here, as the HMB stacks use a very wide, parallel bus, and need to be placed very close to the CPU/SoC die. I think we're talking about distances on the order of 1mm or so. There's only so much room close to a CPU/SoC die to place HBM stacks, given this distance requirement. Don't forget that the HBM stacks and the CPU/SoC die probably have to share a (likely silicon) interposer. The nice thing about HMC ("Hybrid Memory Cube"), is that it uses a serial, rather than a parallel interface like HBM. Thus, HMC can be placed further away from the CPU/SoC die(s), and this can increase total memory capacity. The issue here is, you then pay for this extra capacity in terms of latency, as you have to introduce a SerDes step, etc. Also, one needs to think about power consumption: consider the amount of power, on average, that it takes to move one bit of data to/from memory with HBM vs. HMC; think pico Joules per bit. -- I can't speak much to the GDDRX or NAND stuff myself. XPoint sure sounds interesting, but there has been a lot of hype there. I wonder how this will turn out in the near to mid future. Again, keep an eye on power consumption there, this will limit the solution space XPoint can compete in. I don't know much about helium-filled drives either, sorry.

  • (Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday June 20 2017, @04:01PM (5 children)

    by LoRdTAW (3755) on Tuesday June 20 2017, @04:01PM (#528534) Journal

    All operating systems in the top-10 are Linux and derivates. It seems obvious that, since it is highly optimized hardware, only operating systems are viable which can be fine-tune (so, either open source or with vendor-support for such customizations). Still I would have thought that, since a lot of effort needs to be invested anyway, maybe other systems (BSD?) could be equally suited to the task.

    A better OS would be a distributed OS like Plan 9. And it was ported to Blue gene: http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/blue_gene/ [cat-v.org]

    But the fact remains that Linux has momentum and a really extensive community. The difficult low level kernel stuff has already been taken care of. The others certainly do have passionate supporters but their numbers pale in comparison.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 20 2017, @04:12PM (4 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 20 2017, @04:12PM (#528544)

      "pale in comparison"

      dat's raciss!

      • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday June 20 2017, @04:27PM (3 children)

        by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday June 20 2017, @04:27PM (#528555) Journal

        PAIL in comparison.

        Can't you deal with a simple typo?

        --
        People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
  • (Score: 3, Informative) by CoolHand on Tuesday June 20 2017, @04:28PM (3 children)

    by CoolHand (438) on Tuesday June 20 2017, @04:28PM (#528557) Journal
    Once again, Linux pretty much has the top 500 sewn up (except 2 Unix boxes).. https://www.top500.org/statistics/details/osfam/3 [top500.org]
    --
    Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job-Douglas Adams
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 20 2017, @04:38PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 20 2017, @04:38PM (#528572)

    Do we have independent confirmation of the Chinese computer speeds? There are plenty of people who bought Chinese harddisks and found that the capacity was highly exaggerated [reddit.com]. It would be highly unsurprising if the Tianhe-2 magic switch fabric didn't route three million cores effectively.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 20 2017, @06:45PM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 20 2017, @06:45PM (#528640)

      As someone in the HPC space, I think China's claims on their two top machines are credible. The thing to keep in mind is that the Top 500 list is based on what is essentially a single number: HPL performance. That's not a good benchmark for sustained performance on real science/industry codes. So, are China's machines much faster in one benchmark of dubious value? Yes, quite probably. However, does the USA get more science out of their #4 machine than China's #1 machine? Also quite probable. However, how long will this lead in real sustained performance last? If China is already passing the USA in peak funny numbers, how long until they pass the USA on a more meaningful metric? Probably not too long, unless the USA actually tries hard to keep its lead.

      • (Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday June 20 2017, @08:52PM (1 child)

        by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Tuesday June 20 2017, @08:52PM (#528712) Journal

        If China is already passing the USA in peak funny numbers, how long until they pass the USA on a more meaningful metric? Probably not too long, unless the USA actually tries hard to keep its lead.

        Agreed. They'll get the job done if they want to. And rising in peak funny numbers isn't so bad - the computers are going to get better regardless of LINPACK, and the work they do on the computers is going to have real requirements like I/O bandwidth. Nobody builds a supercomputer simply to get on the list.

        World's fastest computer, Tianhe-2, might get very little use [scmp.com]

        China's newer supercomputers are using "homegrown" chips, which might affect the ability to program for it.

        --
        [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
        • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday June 21 2017, @03:23PM

          by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Wednesday June 21 2017, @03:23PM (#529053) Homepage
          > Nobody builds a supercomputer simply to get on the list.

          https://www.top500.org/system/173225
          Built, did some benchmarks, got on the list, got repurposed (notice it is only on one list, it never got pushed out, it simply disappeared).
          --
          Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
  • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday June 20 2017, @06:14PM (1 child)

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday June 20 2017, @06:14PM (#528623) Journal

    From the Hilights of the list [top500.org] I notice this, which doesn't make cents:

    * Ninety-three (93.0) percent of the systems use processors with eight or more cores
    * sixty-eight (68.6) percent use twelve or more cores
    * and twenty-seven (27.2) percent twelve or more cores.

    Are they using Excel? Or is there some other less likely explanation?

    --
    People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
    • (Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday June 20 2017, @08:39PM

      by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Tuesday June 20 2017, @08:39PM (#528704) Journal

      Probably just typo hell. From the Green500 press release:

      The top four positions are all occupied by newly installed systems in Japan, with the upgraded Piz Daint supercomputer capturing the number five spot.

      [...]

      5 100 Wilkes-2 - Dell C4130, Xeon E5-2650v4 12C 2.2GHz, Infiniband EDR, NVIDIA Tesla P100 , Dell
      University of Cambridge
      United Kingdom 21,240 1,193.0 114 10.428

      6 3 Piz Daint - Cray XC50, Xeon E5-2690v3 12C 2.6GHz, Aries interconnect , NVIDIA Tesla P100 , Cray Inc.
      Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS)
      Switzerland 361,760 19,590.0 2,272 10.398

      Par for the course based on previous Top500/Green500 submissions I've made.

      --
      [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
  • (Score: 1, Troll) by Hairyfeet on Wednesday June 21 2017, @12:36AM (2 children)

    by Hairyfeet (75) <{bassbeast1968} {at} {gmail.com}> on Wednesday June 21 2017, @12:36AM (#528811) Journal

    Because seriously who cares? The OSes these things run have about as much in common with Linux as a top fuel funny car has with your Ford Focus. I guarantee you they strip everything from the kernel on up to maximize throughput and lets be honest guys...they are using Linux because its what everybody else building HPCs use. Its called the network effect [wikipedia.org] and its the same reason windows will always rule the desktop, all the devs who work with HPCs have used custom Linux builds, code from sites like CERN allow you to just build on what is already out there, its why other OSes are barely a blip be they open or not, the sheer inertia Linux has in that market makes any other OS an uphill battle.

    No what the big reveal is is how many of the top HPCs aren't running X86 but instead using custom RISC chips. I'm betting when it comes to HPCs we are reaching the end of general purpose CPUs, instead the future looks to be super specialized RISC chips designed to do specific math problems as efficiently as possible. I mean look at #1, its a custom built Chinese RISC chip [wikipedia.org] that from the read of the Wiki sounds a hell of a lot like the IBM cell processor, with one "supervisor" chip controlling 64 highly specialized chips they call "compute processing elements" that speak to each other through its own "network on a chip". This is about as far removed from general purpose X86 as one can possibly get.

    --
    ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
    • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Wednesday June 21 2017, @08:50AM (1 child)

      by TheRaven (270) on Wednesday June 21 2017, @08:50AM (#528931) Journal
      I don't know why this is moderated troll. He's exactly right: Being the OS on one of these is a dick-waving exercise, but doesn't actually tell you anything. DOS would work as the OS for most of them, their typical workloads require almost no services from the OS and go out of their way not to. It's more interesting that Linux dominates on the low-end HPC market, where you're using small clusters with GPUs (and this is largely because GPGPU drivers for *BSD tend to lag behind Linux, though this is changes as they're increasingly not proprietary).
      --
      sudo mod me up
      • (Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Sunday July 02 2017, @08:41PM

        by Hairyfeet (75) <{bassbeast1968} {at} {gmail.com}> on Sunday July 02 2017, @08:41PM (#534241) Journal

        Because this site is populated by a bunch of Linux fanboys who get butthurt if you aren't waving the flag?

          But bragging and making a big deal about "These run Linux" makes about as much sense as bragging some router is running Linux, the "OS" (if you even can call it that) are so stripped down and specialized it really has little to nothing in common with what we think of as Linux other than a handful of lines of code. I mean have you looked at the CERN build on offer? They have stripped that kernel down like a used Buick at a chop shop, its this teny tiny itsy bitsy thing that has been poured over with a fine tooth comb to remove every line of code they possibly can to minimize overhead.

        But what IS pretty damned interesting is how they are now taking that concept into silicon. Before the list was absolutely dominated by mountains of Xeon or Opteron chips and now the top 10 is almost completely free of X86 and that is only in a space of just 5 years. The chips these monsters are running now is frankly some of the most exotic silicon being made today with "network on a chip" for communication and dozens of highly specialized cores being controlled by a single supervisor. Now THIS would be worth having an article exploring,maybe get some interviews with the guys writing code for these new wave of chip designs or if possible even talk to one of the guys that are designing these chips to talk about the future of where the CPU is headed...but nope according to this site the most important thing? It has half a dozen lines of code in common with Ubuntu...sigh.

        If they want an article to brag about their OS? Then write one about a sector where Linux DOES matter..the home theater and smart TV market. There smart TVs running Linux are growing like mad, and even I'm looking into carrying the lower end Android boxes because if all you want to do is consume media? You really cannot beat the bang for the buck of getting quad ARM with a Mali GPU that does 1080p for less than $50, but this? As I said who cares? The OS is irrelevant and certainly nowhere near as interesting as all this exotic silicon.

        --
        ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 21 2017, @02:44AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 21 2017, @02:44AM (#528855)

    Cheyenne was a country girl,
    always made the horses whinny.

    Cori was a fast girl,
    she would be the first to finish.

    Theta was a hungry one,
    eating crackers in the bed.

    Topaz was a tidy one,
    picked up crumbs with her head.

    Hazel Hen was fashionable,
    always had the latest bag.

    Cori begged to do it,
    when she was on the rag.

    Mira was the calm type,
    nothing made her flip her lid.

    Sequoia was a naturist,
    liked to live off of the grid.

(1)