
World’s fastest supercomputer unveiled in China - MaysonL
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-10/28/chinese-supercomputer
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hugh3
While this will probably cause a certain amount of hand-wringing in the US,
it's nothing to be too concerned about. The bragging rights for "World's
Fastest Computer" are pretty cheap, even cheaper than the bragging rights for
"World's Tallest Building", so you can expect 'em both to be fought over by
secondary countries with something to prove.

All I know about supercomputers based on GPUs is that they're very cheap, very
theoretically fast, and very hard to program for effectively. Any experts in
here who can enlighten us?

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phamilton
I work in an HPC facility. We are all a bit skeptical of LINPACK running on a
hybrid system.

LINPACK in general is an interesting benchmark. We recently bought a new
cluster. We were faced with an interesting decision. Get 4,000 cores with
Infiniband, giving us a spot on the top500 list (We've been on there for the
past 5 years) or get a 6,000 cores with gigabit ethernet, losing our spot on
the top500. (We get %90 of our theoretical max over infiniband. Gigabit drops
that down to 50%). We did a survey among our users and very few of them ran
multinode jobs. Most used 8 or 12 threads, which runs fine on a dual socket
hex core westmere. So we dropped infiniband. So even though we technically
have a slower cluster than we could have had, we have more efficient
utilization and are able to offer our users more resources.

Since very few comercial applications can currently take advantage of a hybrid
system, it seems to me this cluster was built with the top500 in mind, rather
than being efficiently used. As far as useful results, I wouldn't be surprised
if it only accomplished 2 or 3 times what we do, and we're a 10,000 core shop
that probably won't be on the next top500.

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patfla
Adding GPUs seems a no-brainer in retrospect. Have top500 institutions outside
China been trying this approach?

Except one thing. Until recently GPUs have only done single-precision
calculations. Double precisions has been added with the latest architectures
but double is, I believe, still very slow. So this means that single precision
results are sufficient for the top500 tests as well as the particular
applications (in the Tianhe’s case: weather and oil exploration)?

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jra101
Double precision is half the speed of single precision on the GPUs used here
(GF100).

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siculars
This list and China's place on it are both irrelevant for the following
reasons:

1\. Any entrant that extensively relies on GPU's for its performance should
not even be on the list or at least appear with an asterisk. The "G" in GPU
does not stand for general. Consequently this machine is principally
applicable to specific problem sets that are designed to take advantage of the
processing power provided by the GPU.

2\. Primary attention in the supercomputing space has shifted focus from using
pure flops as a metric to flops per watt as the primary concern. Beyond that,
focus has also shifted towards interconnect technology to keep all those flops
well fed with data.

Just like the Chinese to be a few steps behind the thought leaders but front
and center for biggest and most easily duplicated.

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joblessjunkie
In this age of clustered, load-balanced, plain-old-computers in racks, who
cares about a "supercomputer"?

I'm sure Google could claim to have the largest "computer" if they wanted to,
or if the definition of "supercomputer" were stretched a bit.

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LurkingGrue
"hurricane and tsunami modeling, cancer research, car design, even studying
the formation of galaxies"

Yeah, I only use bittorrent to download linux distros as well.

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futuremint
"Car design"? So that means when they start selling Cherry Motors cars over
here they might meet federal safety standards on the first try?

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hugh3
It's called Chery, and... no, probably not.

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treeface
Very cool, and good on China for developing this. However, I would imagine
that it matters less in the modern era of distributed computing how powerful
the biggest computer is, but how powerful the biggest group of computers is.
Isn't folding@home up to about 6 petaflops now?

~~~
wmf
Even in the "modern era", most interesting apps can't run on F@H.

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RiderOfGiraffes
See also:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1843248>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1841807>

~~~
hugh3
Since neither of those has any comments yet, I'm prepared to declare _this_
the official thread.

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
There's another one here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1844338>

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futuremint
I think uses those Loongson MIPS processors.

Edit: According to the PCMag article they're Xeon processors.

~~~
tseabrooks
One of the articles mentioned they may try to move THIS machine over to the
Chinese made processors in the future.

~~~
futuremint
Yeah, I just finished the Business Week article which also stated that the
interconnects are currently a Chinese design.

~~~
oiuhjygtfghjnmk
Anybody can go out and buy 10,000 CPUs/GPUS and put them in a box - the
interconnects are the clever part.

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sagarun
What is the operating system they run on this super computer? GNU/Linux?

