China’s New Supercomputer is Tops

Today, at the opening session of the 2013 International Supercomputing Conference in Leipzig, Germany, the latest update (the 41st version) to the Top 500 list of supercomputers was announced, and a new Chinese system, the Tianhe-2, has taken first place honors.  The system achieved performance of 33.86 petaflops per second (3.386 × 10¹⁶ floating point operations per second) on the LINPACK benchmark; the Tianhe-2 (in English, Milky Way-2) will be deployed at the National Supercomputer Center in Guangzho, China, by the end of the year. The system has 16,000 nodes, each with multiple Intel processors, for a total of 3,120,000 processor cores.

The Titan system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, ranked number 1 in the November, 2012 list, and the Sequoia system, at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, previously ranked number 2, have both moved down one place, to number 2 and number 3, respectively.  The two system are still noteworthy as being among the most energy-efficient in use.  Titan delivers 2,143 Megaflops/Watt, and Sequoia 2,031.6 Megaflops/Watt.

The total capacity of the list has continued to grow quickly.

The last system on the newest list was listed at position 322 in the previous TOP500 just six months ago.  The total combined performance of all 500 systems has grown to 223 petaflop/sec, compared to 162 petaflop/sec six months ago and 123 petaflop/sec one year ago.

You can view the top ten systems, and the complete list, at this page.

Official: Titan is Tops

This morning, the semi-annual Top500 list of the world’s fastest super-computers was released.  As expected, the newly-operational Titan system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory [ORNL] took the top spot, beating out the Sequoia system at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.  Titan achieved performance of 17.59 petaFLOPS (1.759 × 10¹⁶ floating point operations per second) on the LINPACK benchmark.  This measured speed is less than the potential maximum speed of the system, which is rated at 27 petaFLOPS.

It’s a bit puzzling that the Top500 announcement lists the Titan system as having 560,640 processor cores, a number considerably different from the 299,008 cited in the original press release from ORNL.  The Titan system also uses NVIDIA Tesla K20 graphics processors to boost floating-point performance.  It occupies 4,352 square feet of floor space, and draws 8.2 megawatts of electricity.  (Don’t look for a battery-powered mobile version anytime soon.)

As has been true for quite some time, the operating system usage on these machines is rather different from that in the desktop market.

OS Family	Percent of Systems
Linux	93.8
Unix	4.0
Mixed	1.4
Windows	0.6
BSD Unix	0.2

One thing that is striking about these figures is that Linux has almost entirely replaced Unix in this market; in November 2000, 85.4 percent of the Top500 systems ran Unix, while 10.8 percent ran Linux.  Also, obviously, this is one OS market segment where Microsoft has almost no presence.

You can see the complete list here.

Oak Ridge Powers Up Titan

The US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory [ORNL] announced the start-up of a new supercomputer, called Titan, today.   The new machine, which is likely to displace the Sequoia computer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as the world’s fastest supercomputer, has been in the works for two years.

Performance of these systems is ranked based on their speed in floating-point operations per second (FLOP/s), measured on the LINPACK benchmark, which involves the solution of a dense system of linear equations.  The Sequoia, ranked fastest in the world in June of this year, achieved over 16 petaflops (1.6 × 10¹⁶ flops); the new Titan system is rated at 27 petaflops (2.7 × 10¹⁶ flops).

The Titan system uses a hybrid architecture that includes both conventional 16-core Opteron 6274 CPUs, and NVIDIA Tesla K-20 GPUs.  It has a total of 18,688 compute nodes, each containing a GPU and a CPU, for a total of 299.008 CPU cores.  The system also has more than 700 terabytes ( 7 × 10¹⁴ bytes) of memory.  (Apparently 640KB is no longer enough for anyone.)  The hybrid architecture results in better energy efficiency; Titan gets about ten times the performance of its predecessor at ORNL, the Jaguar, at less than 30% more electricity consumption.  It is, however, rather large, requiring 4,352 square feet of floor space.

James Hack, Director of ORNL’s National Center for Computational Sciences, said “Titan will allow scientists to simulate physical systems more realistically and in far greater detail. The improvements in simulation fidelity will accelerate progress in a wide range of research areas such as alternative energy and energy efficiency, the identification and development of novel and useful materials and the opportunity for more advanced climate projections.”

The ORNL press release is here.