
Interactive Map of the World's Fastest Supercomputers - timr
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/11/17/business/20081118-super-graphic.html?ref=technology
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sh1mmer
To put this in perspective the largest Hadoop cluster Yahoo (or anyone) has
spun up is 4000 2.5ghz dual-processor quad-core Xeons. According to
<http://www.clustervision.com/cluster_hardware.html> a Xeon runs about 4 flops
per cycle. That means the entire cluster was running at about 20 megaflops.

The smallest computer on that map is 27 teraflops. More than a factor of 1000
on our cluster.

That said, raw power isn't everything. I know we were all impressed with
Google's recent TB processing record, which prove the old adage _it's not how
big it is, it's what you do with it_.

~~~
randomwalker
Damn. I think you managed to get every single number wrong :-)

First of all, FLOPS is not the same as FLOPs / cycle. Note the lowercase 's'.
The former is floating point operations _per second_. The latter is per cycle.
To convert the latter number into FLOPS, you have to multiply by the clock
speed. That gives you 10^10 FLOPS, or 10 gigaflops. Now that's _per-core._ You
said quad-core, so it's 40 gigaflops per processor. 4000 processors, so it's
160 teraflops. Much higher than the slowest on that list, but much lower than
the fastest.

The other thing you got wrong is that if it were a mere 20 megaflops, it would
have been a factor of a _million_ slower :-) Tera is 10^12.

Anyway, I think this whole thing is apples-to-oranges because actual
supercomputers have a much more tightly inter-connected grid (I believe) than
the sort of loose cluster that Hadoop typically runs on, and further, they
have a different programming model (Fortran with MPI and things like that.)

~~~
sh1mmer
Sigh. And this is why I shouldn't stray outside of my realm of expertise late
at night, even if it seems like an interesting diversion.

Thanks for the correction :)

~~~
ovi256
And that is why I should not upvote without fact-checking. Multiplying is easy
after all.

