Accelerators tag team in Top500 supercomputer CPU smackdown

This fall's Top500 supercomputer sites ranking continues the smackdown between massively parallel supercomputers based on CPUs and somewhat less-massive machines using a mix of CPUs and accelerators. In this round, the hybrid ceepie-geepies, which mix CPUs and GPU coprocessors, have the CPU-only boxes on the ropes – and the …

[Lars]

I wonder

when they will all move from Linux to the superior micro kernel in Hurd.

[Richard Lloyd]

Despite a long analysis, nothing much said about the OS'es running on them

I'm not sure we needed all that stuff carved up every which way when a simple link to the "select your Top 500 filters" form here (where no doubt the author got his stats from) would do:

http://www.top500.org/statistics/sublist/

Also, the lack of discussion of OS'es in the article was surprising - here's some fascinating OS stats left out:

* The top 36 supercomputers in the world all run Linux. The shameful first non-Linux entry at number 37 is from the UK :-( Mind you, it was IBM's AIX, so it's not all so bad.

* Linux has 469 of the top 500 spots - a massive 93.8%!

* Windows has 3 spots (0.6%), which either it can't scale to very high numbers of cores or that the licensing is expensive. Ine of those is Microsoft's Azure so that's free to MS :-) No idea why the article highlighted this one when it's in 165th place. The lowly position - 63 places behind Amazon's rival AWS - bizarrely wasn't mentioned in the article!

* BSD has one solitary entry...so it is dying after all :-)

[FuzzyTheBear]

how to loose a lot of time explained . Chap 1

I was like .. what's 17.59 Petaflop/s looking like ?

If we substitute a calculation for a grain of sand , 1 micro liter volume per grain

well lo and behold .. that makes for a second 17,590,000,000 liters of sand

roughly 23 million cubic yards : in the end .. it takes 237 seconds to account for all

the grains in a cubic mile of sand. ( or so .. )

An incredible number when it's breoken down in terms we can put our heads around .

I told you it was time lost :)

ric

[rav]

Titan use Opteron 6274 cpu's

The Oak Ridge Titan uses AMD 6274 cpu's one for one with the nVidia gpu's. Get it right.

[MJI]

Curious

I have heard about the Condor Cluster is supposed to be on that list, but it isn't.