I used to work for NERSC when they ran Seaborg. Before that, i ran my PhD simulations on the T3E Mjolnir (PSC) and the other one, at SDSC whose name I forget. Back in those days, those were supercomputers, but a single cloud machine replaces one of those now.
The only thing I consider a supercomputer is a device designed for capability computing where the capability is ability to run codes that exhibit strong scaling due to their interconnect. The petaflops you quote are calculated by the strong scaling of LINPACK due to its design. I think you need a large amount of petaflops these days to really be considered a supercomputer. And those petaflops come from having a combination of low latency and high bandwidth-- you couldn't just point at Exacycle and say "that's a supercomputer".
The 3PB filesystem and 50Gb/s IO (you didn't say if that was per-node, or the bisection bandwidth of the central switch, or what) aren't particularly "super".
In some sense this is just arguing about the definition of a supercomputer which isn't super interesting; I have a preconceived notion of what one is. If Amazon put a bunch of machines on an MPI switch (IIRC they actually have) and scored well in Top500, and you could buy time on it, and it scaled your code, they'd have one too.
The only thing I consider a supercomputer is a device designed for capability computing where the capability is ability to run codes that exhibit strong scaling due to their interconnect. The petaflops you quote are calculated by the strong scaling of LINPACK due to its design. I think you need a large amount of petaflops these days to really be considered a supercomputer. And those petaflops come from having a combination of low latency and high bandwidth-- you couldn't just point at Exacycle and say "that's a supercomputer".
The 3PB filesystem and 50Gb/s IO (you didn't say if that was per-node, or the bisection bandwidth of the central switch, or what) aren't particularly "super".
In some sense this is just arguing about the definition of a supercomputer which isn't super interesting; I have a preconceived notion of what one is. If Amazon put a bunch of machines on an MPI switch (IIRC they actually have) and scored well in Top500, and you could buy time on it, and it scaled your code, they'd have one too.