[Beowulf] China Wrests Supercomputer Title From U.S.

[Gus Correa]

Hi Bill, list

Here is it from The Register:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/10/28/china_tianhe_1a_supercomputer/

Which real real production applications ran on Jaguar across all processors?
I heard of large high-resolution climate models that ran on Jaguar
and on Kraken, using about 6000 cores, but not the full set available.
There certainly are other large applications, though.

Thanks,

Gus Correa

Bill Rankin wrote:
> I was just going to post the same thing, but with the HPCWire link instead.
> 
> http://www.hpcwire.com/blogs/New-China-GPGPU-Super-Outruns-Jaguar-105987389.html
> 
> A few comments:
> 
> A 42% increase (2.5TF v. 1.75TF for jaguar) is not a "wide margin".  
If I did my math right, that represents about 7 months
worth of gain on the growth curve for the Top500 list
(peak performance growth is ~2x every 13 months).
> 
> Linpack is very forgiving of low-bandwidth networks 
(or PCI-x busses in this case).
> 
> This strikes me as a machine that will most likely 
never see a single application that runs on the full system.
There is nothing wrong with that per-se, but it must be taken
into consideration when comparing it to machines that have run
real production applications across the entire processor set (ie. Jaguar).
> 
> What this machine does do is validate to some extent the 
continued use and development of GPUs in an HPC/cluster setting.
I will admit that I have been very skeptic in the past as to whether
GPU-based computing had any long-term traction.
In my defense I have seen many past examples of
specialized computing approaches that did not
survive past the first generation and eventually
lost out to the general purpose microprocessor.

I will now admit that GPU technology may have a bigger
long-term impact that I had originally imagined.
> 
> -b
> 
>> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/28/technology/28compute.html
>>
>> --
>> Prentice Bisbal
>> Linux Software Support Specialist/System Administrator
>> School of Natural Sciences
>> Institute for Advanced Study
>> Princeton, NJ
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