A Cray XT5 supercomputer dubbed “Jaguar” has claimed the spot as the world’s most powerful computer, taking away the crown from an IBM supercomputer called Roadrunner.
Located at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, Jaguar posted a 1.75 petaflop per second (petaflop/sec.) performance speed running a benchmark called the Linpack, according to the newest edition of the Supercomputer Top 500 list. The newest edition of the list was released at the SC 09 supercomputer conference this week in Portland, Ore.
This was actually Jaguar’s third attempt to take the title away from IBM’s Roadrunner, which has held the world’s top spot for the last 18 months. This time Jaguar roared ahead with new six core Opteron processors from Advanced Micro Devices. Jaguar utilizes nearly a quarter of a million cores and has a theoretical peak capacity of 2.3 petaflop/sec.
IBM’s Roadrunner system, which is installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, was the world’s first supercomputer to reach petaflop/sec. speeds. It claimed the top supercomputer crown in June 2008 and held the spot in the November 2008 and June 2009 Top 500 roundup. This time around, however, Roadrunner only managed a 1.04 petaflop/sec. performance, down from 1.105 petaflop/sec. in June 2009, which was attributed to a repartitioning of the system.
Kraken, another upgraded Cray XT5 system, installed at the National Institute for Computational Sciences at the University of Tennessee, claimed the No. 3 position with a performance of 832 teraflops/sec. No. 4 was the IBM BlueGene/P supercomputer located at the Forschungszentrum Juelich in Germany at 825.5 teraflop/sec. And rounding out the top five was the new Tianhe-1, which means River in Sky, located at the National Super Computer Center in Tianjin, China. Tianhe-1 is being used for research in petroleum exploration and simulation of large aircraft designs.
Overall, the world’s supercomputers are getting faster. The entry level of the latest Top 500 list moved up to 20 teraflop/sec. from 17.1 teraflop/sec. The last system on the latest list would have ranked No. 336 on the previous Top 500 list just six months ago.
The full list can be viewed here: http://www.top500.org/
Nice post. Whenever I see a reference to Cray, I have to read closely to determine if the subject is a supercomputer or the inventor/founder, Seymour Cray. Cray (the man) was involved with serveral companies that made computers. Look up Cray on wikipedia for some interesting tales including the frozen computer, tunnel digging with elves, and Seymour as a code breaker in World War II.
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seymour_Cray
I am delighted that Cray surpassed IBM, not because I have a preference for one company over another. Rather, the competition between these two fuels innovation. The resulting enhanced modeling and simulation capabilities continue to add value of a type not found in other computing "genres".
ReplyDeleteThe research that is facilitated by having such massively complex computing power enables discoveries that will serve us well. Kudos to Cray, and may IBM renew there efforts to regain the lead.
Appreciable post. Here are some interesting facts:
ReplyDelete1. HP accounted for 210 of this year's 500, and IBM 185.
2. In terms of processors in use, Intel still enjoys the lion's share, with 80 percent.
3. The most popular operating system is Linux, with 90 percent of the Top500.
4. The Roadrunner uses roughly half the power of the Jaguar XT.IBM used less than half the number of processors in their design,(hence roughly half the power of the Cray system).
5. If we took NetworkWorld's semiliterate reporting at face value, it would mean CRAY XT5 booted in one second. (I find this unlikely)
6. The biggest impact on performance of supercomputer is firstly the algorithm itself. The next biggest factor is either the system interconnect -- the topology that each processor and cluster is tied together -- and software.
7. The United States, which is still the top consumer of HPC (high-performance computing) systems in the world, with 291 of the top 500 systems running in this country.
8. Irrelevant factoid that may only interest me: Four of the top five systems are based on AMD tech, while 402 of the top 500 are powered by Intel. system more than 224,000 processing cores.
Intel in the first half of 2010 will release a version of its upcoming “Nehalem EX” chip optimized for HPC (high-performance computing). The six-core HPC-optimized version will run faster than the mainstream eight-core versions of the chip, according to Intel, and will offer other advantages for supercomputing.
AMD in early 2010 will release its “Maranello” Opteron platform, which will feature the “Magny-Cours” chips that will have from eight to 12 processing cores.
Most of the Top 500 supercomputers -- 426 systems -- now use quad-core processors.
This post strikes me one thing....IBM title always talks about innovation and it is appreciable that they bring in many creative thoughts but don't implement them in a big way or dedicatedly..pitty IBM... that a part of ibm emerges as a new company ,implementing these new ideas and become popular.....
ReplyDeleteThis is another example of that kind...