Posted on 11/13/2018 3:25:08 AM PST by ShadowAce
The semi-annual Top500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers was released on Nov. 12, with the U.S holding down the top two spots overall.
The IBM POWER9 based Summit system has retained its crown that it first achieved in the June 2018 ranking. Summit is installed at the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory and now has performance of 143.5 petaflops per second, up from the 122.3 petaflops the system had when it first came online.
The IBM POWER9 Sierra system also improved over the last six months and is now the second most powerful system on the plant at 94.6 petaflops, up from 71.6 petfalops six months ago.
Prior to Summit and Sierra coming online, the most power supercomputer in the U.S. was the Cray XK7 Titan, which is also at Oak Ridge National Lab. Titan now has 17.6 petaflops of power, making it the ninth most power system in the world today.
Though China doesn't hold the top spot on the list, it now has more supercomputers than any other other nation with 227. In contrast, there are now only 109 systems on the Top500 list that are located in the U.S., which is an all-time low.
That said, thanks to the enormous power of Summit and Sierra at the top, the U.S. is home to 38 percent of the total aggregate supercomputing power on the top500 list, while China's systems account for 31 percent.
The vendors supplying the hardware behind the Top500 supecomputers are also somewhat mixed. While IBM dominates the top of the list with Sierra and Summit, overall Lenovo is the leader in terms of total systems with 117.
"Last year, we set a goal to become the world’s largest provider of TOP500 computing systems by 2020. We have reached that goal two years ahead of our original plan,” Kirk Skaugen, President of Lenovo Data Center Group, wrote in a statement. "We are motivated every day by the scientists and their groundbreaking research as we work together to solve humanity’s greatest challenges."
Another vendor that is seeing its technology more widely used than every before is NVIDIA. 127 of the top 500 system now have an NVIDIA GPU accelerator, up from 86 in 2017.
"With the end of Moore's Law, a new HPC market has emerged, fuelled by new AI and machine learning workloads," Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, wrote in a statement. "These rely as never before on our high performance, highly efficient GPU platform to provide the power required to address the most challenging problems in science and society."
While IBM dominates the top of the list with Sierra and Summit, overall Lenovo is the leader in terms of total systems with 117. "Last year, we set a goal to become the world’s largest provider of TOP500 computing systems by 2020. We have reached that goal two years ahead of our original plan,” Kirk Skaugen, President of Lenovo Data Center Group, wrote in a statement.
The U.S. once stood far and alone in the supercomputer market. Then sone fools (or traitors) let NASA put their supercomputer code in Linux and give it away to China for free...
Traitors.
You do know the differences between application code and OS code, right?
Of course. But from the sound of your question, it doesn’t sound like you realize that is not what is being benchmarked. In fact there is now way to even compare application code performance between the U.S and China, because there are no set standards by which to measure, nor is that code even available for review. As far as anyone knows, their application code could far exceed ours, so with all respect your question seems completely off base. Or more likely, a diversion attempt to justify our extremely sensitive U.S government code being put into the foreign born Linux clone of Unix, then given to the rest of the world for free.
I’m thinking not ...
My question was aimed at your original assertion that Linux was to blame for China being in the top spot.
But can I play The Crew on a large 3D monitor at max resolution with all the bells and whistles turned on with no glitching?
Put McAfee drive encryption on and see things deteriorate.
Another miserable product.
Yeah—I know a lot of people who consider anything by McAfee is a virus.
ML/NJ
1000 teraflops.
Not really sure what your claim is? What did NASA supposedly “give away”? SMP scheduling? Their MPI implementation? Modern supercomputers are built to use fairly standard software components. Not much “secret sauce” here that the Chinese couldn’t do themselves if they needed to.
You almost make sense. Data management belongs to the OS, and to,the app; data manipulation mainly to the app (yes, I know there are certain optimized shell functions, but they’re a PITA for all but simple files). The key is that a bottleneck in either one will kill performance, see also Amdahl’s Law. So why solve half the problem for the Chicoms? (Not to mention Lenovo itself as a security risk.)
I thought it was Spyware.
What I think is funny is the absolute dearth of anything with MS-Windows. It would appear that only Unix and Linux are up to the task.
Ridiculous. NASA made countless “contributions” to the world at large, and being the government they should be the last one giving our best technological secrets away to supposedly save money. NUMA was one of the most important ones, which affects network drivers and memory management specific for supercomputer performance. IBM and SGI were the 2 main partners, one dead now and the other one dying.
Wow. You don't really think things through very well, do you?
Our "best technological secrets" are classified. Which means they don't show up anywhere outside of the NSA/CIA/etc.
What was contributed is not classified, by definition. Hence, they are NOT our secrets. NUMA may be useful, but I bet better exists somewhere that we are not allowed access.
Tone your LDS down a little. We'll get along better.
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