SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
The U.S. leads the June 2018 TOP500 list with a 122.3 petaflops system:
The TOP500 celebrates its 25th anniversary with a major shakeup at the top of the list. For the first time since November 2012, the US claims the most powerful supercomputer in the world, leading a significant turnover in which four of the five top systems were either new or substantially upgraded.
Summit, an IBM-built supercomputer now running at the Department of Energy's (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), captured the number one spot with a performance of 122.3 petaflops on High Performance Linpack (HPL), the benchmark used to rank the TOP500 list. Summit has 4,356 nodes, each one equipped with two 22-core Power9 CPUs, and six NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs. The nodes are linked together with a Mellanox dual-rail EDR InfiniBand network.
[...] Sierra, a new system at the DOE's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory took the number three spot, delivering 71.6 petaflops on HPL. Built by IBM, Sierra's architecture is quite similar to that of Summit, with each of its 4,320 nodes powered by two Power9 CPUs plus four NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs and using the same Mellanox EDR InfiniBand as the system interconnect.
The #100 system has an Rmax of 1.703 petaflops, up from 1.283 petaflops in November. The #500 system has an Rmax of 715.6 teraflops, up from 548.7 teraflops in June.
273 systems have a performance of at least 1 petaflops, up from 181 systems. The combined performance of the top 500 systems is 1.22 exaflops, up from 845 petaflops.
On the Green500 list, Shoubu system B's efficiency has been adjusted to 18.404 gigaflops per Watt from 17.009 GFLOPS/W. The Summit supercomputer, #1 on TOP500, debuts at #5 on the Green500 with 13.889 GFLOPS/W. Japan's AI Bridging Cloud Infrastructure (ABCI) supercomputer, #5 on TOP500 (19.88 petaflops Rmax), is #8 on the Green500 with 12.054 GFLOPS/W.
Previously: TOP500 List #50 and Green500 List #21: November 2017
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday June 26 2018, @12:32AM (15 children)
Pretty soon, all of the top 500 systems will exceed 1 petaflops. No more crappy terascale machines!
And finally, all 500 systems combined total over 1 exaflops. If you compared the ratio of combined top 500 performance to the top system, you could come up with a number of exaflops that could be reached by the time the #1 system hits 1 exaflops:
1.22 exaflops / 122.3 petaflops ~= 10
845 petaflops / 93 petaflops ~= 9 (Nov. 2017)
566.7 petaflops / 93 petaflops ~= 6 (Jun. 2016)
420 petaflops / 33.9 petaflops ~= 12.4 (Nov. 2015)
We'll probably have a combined 5-8 exaflops when the first 1 exaflops system lands. Maybe more if two or three countries try to rush to claim the milestone.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday June 26 2018, @12:39AM (13 children)
And what exactly are 'we' doing with the combined exaflop?
other than listing them in the top 500, like sorta pissing context
My point: combined 'flopping power' seems a meaningless metric.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Tuesday June 26 2018, @12:45AM
It depends on the system or country. China is said to have had trouble fully utilizing Sunway TaihuLight, but most U.S. systems likely exceed 90% most of the time:
http://www.nersc.gov/users/live-status/ [nersc.gov]
https://portal.tacc.utexas.edu [utexas.edu]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday June 26 2018, @01:19AM
> combined 'flopping power' seems a meaningless metric.
Wait a couple Years for the Italians to come back, synchronous flopping will amaze you.
/world_cup
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday June 26 2018, @01:27AM (8 children)
So there's no 'we' as in 'we using the exaflopping for a common purpose/project', it's "each one for oneself".
How's that 'combined exaflop comp-power' meaningful in these circumstances?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday June 26 2018, @02:29AM
Wow, someone is a standard deviation more cynical than usual today.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Tuesday June 26 2018, @03:05AM (1 child)
World peace!
No more disease!
No more famine!
Nup, just moar! We have a bigger one! Yay team!
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 3, Touché) by takyon on Tuesday June 26 2018, @03:09AM
-1, Not as Cynical as Nu-c0lo
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday June 26 2018, @04:13AM (4 children)
So... one really big computer for everyone? What happens when some admin decides I can't read SN anymore because they're using the computer for more important stuff?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday June 26 2018, @04:41AM (3 children)
I didn't imply that 'we should have a single super-computer'. I was just making the point that we don't have one.
And I made this point to serve the context for the question "What use the 'total-compute-power' has if we don't actually have a single computer nor a single project that require the use of all computers?"
And it's a genuine question, no implication that we should or should not use the 'total-compute-power'.
I hope it's clearer now. And, as usual, any pertinent (to my mind) answer will get the deserved upmod from me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday June 26 2018, @04:50AM (2 children)
Why wouldn't we be interested in understanding the quantity of computing power available?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday June 26 2018, @05:06AM (1 child)
I don't know why I would not.
I don't know why I would, either.
This is why I asked, "what would be the use of this metric?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday June 26 2018, @11:14AM
For example, if you're thinking about building a machine that does computations that would be closely measured by the High Performance Linpack benchmark, this total would give you some idea of where your machine would stack up against current registered competition.
And who knows, there are real world problems that one can throw all that computing power at. Perhaps some day, one of those problems will become important enough to do so.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by martyb on Tuesday June 26 2018, @11:18AM (1 child)
Well, not entirely meaningless...
Let's look at the TOP500 list for 1993 [top500.org] which was the first time the list was published.
According to my calculations, the sum of the "Rpeak" for all systems on the list in June of 1993 came to: 1798.1 (GFlop/s).
tl;dr: If you gathered every single one of the 500 fastest computers on planet Earth in 1993 and put them all in one place, and somehow found a way to make them all work together, you would have a combined *peak* performance of ~1.8 teraflops... OR... you could just buy a *single* graphics *card* today.
Though effective useless in an analytical sense, I find it quite effectively gives me a subjective sense of the amazing march of computer processing power over the past quarter century.
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday June 26 2018, @11:40AM
Thanks, the angle is interesting.
See, they tried to do it 1 year later with the Beowulf cluster [wikipedia.org]... and inadvertently triggered the creation of the green site, the meme absolutely needed a place to come into existence.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Informative) by martyb on Tuesday June 26 2018, @06:12PM
Well, THAT was interesting!
I downloaded all the top500 reports from the beginning (June of 1993).
Then, for each of those reports, and for each of Rmax and Rpeak, computed what the sum was.
Here is what I found:
So, the top system in June of 1993 had Rmax of 59 (GFlops). The sum of Rmax for all 500 systems on that list totalled 1127. That means the top system had 5.2% of the Rmax performance of all 500 computers on that list, combined. Similarly, the top system had Rpeak of 131 (GFlops). The sum of Rpeak for all 500 systems totalled 1798. Thus, the top system had 7.3% of the Rpeak performance of all the systems, combined.
Wit is intellect, dancing.