The latest Top500 Fastest Supercomputer World Ranking is out
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And Singapore currently has only ONE site in this top500 list. The accolade of having the fastest supercomputer system in Singapore belongs to Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing (CSM) .
The system they used is called Clustered Platform 4000 DL145 Opteron 2.2 Ghz Myrinet by Hewlett-Packard. It uses 384 AMD Opteron 2200 MHz processors all clustered and linked together using the Myrinet topology.
The benchmark used to compile this top500 list is the LINPACK benchmark. The CSM system scored 1192.2 GFLops and is rank a mere #490 (ten place from bottom). I have been following this ranking since 2003 and this is probably the worst showing by Singapore. We use to have at least 3-5 sites in the top500. NUS, NTU, A*STAR and even Citibank Singapore use to be in the top500 list. Unfortunately they are now nowhere in the top500 list. That is how fast the supercomputer scene is changing and Singapore is apparently being left behind.
The world fastest Supercomputer today is the BlueGene/L – eServer by IBM and is installed at the US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore. Their score on the same benchmark test was 136800 GFlops!!! (compare this to 1192.2 GFLops for the CSM system. About 130 times faster!!!)
The complete list can be found here http://www.top500.org/lists/plists.php?Y=2005&M=06
And to all those of you from Chartered Semiconductor ManufacturingÂ…the next time you think your system is slowÂ…give a thought to the rest of us who have to live without a supercomputer
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i got no $$ leh... not interested!
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erm.. please infuse me with some more knowledge.. why are supercomputers needed?.. i only know they are used in space technology etc.. nasa and stuff
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give a thought to the rest of us who have to live without a supercomputer
Of cuz with a faster supercomputer theoretically the applications are supposed to run faster. Hardware is one factor but not the determinating factor. Software also plays a part. If the software is written in a very inefficient way using lousy data structures and algorithm, no matter how good the hardware is, the intensive load pumped into the software will also slow the overall performance. It is always so easy to say slow then get faster hardware lor. Before one attempts to take that approach, one gotta check if the software is indeed the culprit or not.
Through my working experience, very often it is the combination of software and hardware that contribute to 'slowness'. Most of the time, efficient software do can compensate for the hardware slowness. One major factor is I/O. Software that always write and read from database is going to suffer. Some jobs should be processed in memory and the final output written to disk. That is the ideal approach. -
There are many applications for supercomputers. The Blue Gene/L by IBM used by the US DOE at Livermore is used for Nuclear research. This Blue Gene/L was actually develop by IBM for genetics research. This system, if I am not mistaken, is related to the Deep Blue computer that beat Gary Kasparov in chess sometime back (first time a world champion lost to a computer in competitive chess).Originally posted by coffeeortea:erm.. please infuse me with some more knowledge.. why are supercomputers needed?.. i only know they are used in space technology etc.. nasa and stuff
I donÂ’t know what Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing uses their supercomputer forÂ…maybe to calculate their managing directors outrageous paycheckÂ….HeheheheÂ…jokes aside, probably to design their semiconductor chips.
NUS and NTU used to have computer system categories as supercomputers and were in previous top500 list. They are used forÂ…well what elseÂ…research purposes.
If you look at the top500 list, you will notice many are for research purpose and are installed in universities. Than there are systems for weather/climate prediction, for the petrochemical industries, for biomedical industriesÂ….etc. -
Originally posted by sohguanh:
Agreed.
[b]give a thought to the rest of us who have to live without a supercomputer
Of cuz with a faster supercomputer theoretically the applications are supposed to run faster. Hardware is one factor but not the determinating factor. Software also plays a part. If the software is written in a very inefficient way using lousy data structures and algorithm, no matter how good the hardware is, the intensive load pumped into the software will also slow the overall performance. It is always so easy to say slow then get faster hardware lor. Before one attempts to take that approach, one gotta check if the software is indeed the culprit or not.
Through my working experience, very often it is the combination of software and hardware that contribute to 'slowness'. Most of the time, efficient software do can compensate for the hardware slowness. One major factor is I/O. Software that always write and read from database is going to suffer. Some jobs should be processed in memory and the final output written to disk. That is the ideal approach.[/b]
Anyway, there will probably be no use for a supercomputer in most of the commercial applications. Bottlenecks cause by other factors as you have described will only make the raw processing power of the supercomputer redundant.