[Beowulf] dollars-per-teraflop : any lists like the Top500?

[Joshua mora acosta]

I think the money part will be difficult to get (it is like a politically
incorrect question).
Nevertheless, you can split the money in two parts: purchase (which I am sure
you will never get) and electric bill for kipping the system up and running
while you run HPL and when you run stream.
Then you could try at least to put the cost of the electric bill.
electric_bill_(USD)/performance_(TFLOPs)
The electric bill though will change for a given amount of kWs depending on
the contract/location you establish with the electric company. So it is
difficult to get that info as well.
So it is perhaps better to compare systems in terms of TFLOP/kW. And factor in
there what you are capable of negotiating on electric cost and purchase and
support.
Going back to the easy part:
For instance on GPU_CPU cluster based systems, you can achieve
1.1(real_DP_TFLOP)/kW with a ratio GPU/CPU=2
With that I have factored a whole rack with HW and SW stacks for 10TF real
double precission under 400K USD cost.

Joshua

------ Original Message ------
Received: 12:45 AM CDT, 06/30/2010
From: Rahul Nabar <rpnabar at gmail.com>
To: Beowulf Mailing List <beowulf at beowulf.org>
Subject: [Beowulf] dollars-per-teraflop : any lists like the Top500?

> The Top500 list has many useful metrics but I didn't see any $$ based
> metrics there. Are there any lists that document the $-per-teraflop
> (apologies to international members!) of any of the systems in the
> Supercomputer / Beowulf world? Googling "dollars per teraflop" didn't
> give me anything useful.
> 
> I'm speculating, one reason could be that sites are loath to disclose
> their exact $ purchase prices etc. But on the other hand for most of
> the publicly owned  systems this should be accessible information
> anyways. I was just thinking that this might be an interesting
> parameter to track. I was also curious as to when systems become
> larger is there an economy of scale in the Beowulf world? i.e. for
> something like Jaguar or Kraken is the $/teraflop much lower than what
> it is for my tiny 100-node system. Another question could be: Is it
> cheaper to assemble 100 Teraflops of capacity in the US or WU or China
> etc.
> 
> Of course, HPC is not really commoditized so a Teraflop based $ value
> may not be strictly an apples-to-apples comparison but still.....
> 
> Just wondering what statistics are available out there......
> 
> -- 
> Rahul
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