The twice-a-year list of the Top 500 supercomputers documents the most powerful systems on the planet. But what do those supercomputers look like? The Top 10 Supercomputers, Illustrated, Nov. 2011 article takes a look at the top finishers in the latest Top 500 list. Many of them are striking not just for their processing power, but for their design and appearance as well. The article has nice pictures of them.
6 Comments
Malou says:
This is a very useful information. I don’t have any idea before that theses are the top computers. The photos also were great on your link provided. Thank you.
Malou
Blog: gourmette enfant
Tomi Engdahl says:
California Nuke Simulator Is World’s Most Powerful Computer
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/06/top500-llnl/
With 1.5 million processing cores, Livermore’s Sequoia supercomputer weighs about the same as 30 elephants, and it can do more calculations per second than any machine ever built. How many? 16.3 quadrillion, according to benchmark numbers researchers at the national lab submitted for international supercomputing benchmarking contest called the Top500 list. In benchmarking terms, that translates to 16.3 petaflops per second.
That blows away the reigning top supercomputer, Japan’s K computer, installed at the Riken Advanced Institute for Computational Science, which can deliver 10.5 petaflops per second.
Tomi Engdahl says:
VLSCI’s supercomputer passes acceptance test, lands in top 50
BlueGene/Q nearly ready to unleash 65 TB of RAM, 65,536-cores
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/18/vlsci_blue_gene_acceptance_test/
The Victorian Life Sciences Computation Initiative – VLSCI to its friends – is close to opening up its BlueGene/Q powerhouse for user jobs.
Installation was commenced on June 4, with each rack being powered up individually before the entire machine was fired.
The 65 TB of RAM, 65,536-core machine, given the name Avoca, is currently Australia’s fastest supercomputer and almost certainly the fastest live sciences research machine in the Southern Hemisphere. In fact, Taylor told The Register, his personal research suggests Avoca is currently the “most powerful machine below 30 degrees North latitude”.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Nvidia says Tesla K20 systems will be out before November
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2184831/nvidia-tesla-k20-systems-november
CHIP DESIGNER Nvidia has said that it will have Fermi based K20 Tesla boards in supercomputers in time for November’s Top 500 list.
Nvidia recently launched its Kepler K10 Tesla boards that focus on single-precision floating point performance, with the firm claiming its Tesla K20 boards will appear in the fourth quarter. Now the firm has said it expects supercomputer clusters featuring its Tesla K20 boards will appear in the November 2012 Top 500 list.
“A lot of the supercomputing centres running Linpack need double-precision [floating point] and our double-precision product is going to be available in the Q4 time frame, so its not going to impact Top 500 in the June announcement. But we expect to make a huge impact in the November announcement.”
Nvidia claims its K20 Tesla boards will provide three times the double-precision floating point performance of its previous generation Fermi M2090 boards, which in theory would put the board in the 1.5TFLOP region, significantly higher than AMD and Intel are currently claiming with their respective Firepro and Xeon Phi products expected around the same time.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The world’s fastest supercomputer title has been returned to the United States years after the break. IBM’s Sequoia has nearly 1.6 million processor cores. Performance is more than 16 petaflops (million billion calculations per second). Sequoia has a total of 1.57 million IBM’s own Power processor cores.
Japan’s K-supercomputer is in second place on list. The K-machine has more than 700 000 processor cores and 10.5 petaflops.
United States Government just got Mira computer form IBM (quite similar but smaller than Sequoia). It took third place with 8.2 petaflops.
The fourth is based in Germany SuperMUC-machine, with output of 2.9 petaflops.
Followed by Tianhe-1A (China), Jaguar (USA), Fermi (Italy) and JuQueen (Germany).
Source: http://www.3t.fi/artikkeli/uutiset/teknologia/nopeimmassa_superkoneessa_1_6_miljoonaa_prosessoriydinta
Tomi Engdahl says:
Earlier this week, the Beeb described IBM’s Sequoia supercomputer as being so potent that it could do in one hour “what otherwise would have taken 6.7 billion people using hand calculators 320 years to complete if they had worked non-stop”.
Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/22/reg_standards_vid/