Titan Tops Top500 Supercomputing List

miller60 writes "The new Top500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers is out, and the new champion is Titan, the new and improved system that previously ruled the Top500 as Jaguar. Oak Ridge Labs' Titan knocked Livermore Labs' Sequoia system out of the top spot, with a Linpack benchmark of more than 17 petaflops. Check out the full list, or an illustrated guide to the top 10."

My previous place of employment - #71

[Cutting_Crew]

NASA/Stennis Space Center, Mississippi. Used to be in the top 10. they have fallen way behind.

Redudundant expression

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry to be pedantic, but "petaflops a second" is redundant -- FLOPS means "floating-point operations per second."

Re:Obligatory

[cashman73]

This is significant, because if you look at the list, Titan only has about 500,000 cores, versus 1.5 million cores on Sequoia. The overall increase in peta-FLOPS isn't that much, but the fact that Titan did this with only about 1/3 the cores as Sequoia IS significant.

Re:And The software is???

[Anonymous Coward]

It ships with Compute Node Linux, which is a cut down (lower overhead) version of SLES. It supports several schedulers, but ORNL typically uses Altair PBS on the big systems (http://www.cray.com/Products/XK/Software.aspx [cray.com]). ORNL provides a large number of compilers and libraries that users can use in the form of 'modules' (http://www.olcf.ornl.gov/support/user-guides/titan-user-guide/ [ornl.gov]). And in terms of scheduling/partitioning, the user just requests a specific number of nodes when they submit a job, and they get those nodes to themselves for the allotted time. It's pretty low-impact on the compute nodes, and less exciting than you might think. They don't put much emphasis on the software when reporting on these machines, because it's stripped down as much as possible to allow the user applications to run at peak performance.

Hard to discover which OS the computers use.

[Anonymous Coward]

The obvious question "which are running Linux" is almost impossible to answer. Are they sponsored by Microsoft? However, you can use the "sublist" feature to make a list of the first 500 computers and limit to "Linux" as operating system. The list contains 469 entries, and the first number that is missing from this list is "38".

Huh.

So while it will refuse to actually show the OS, the sublisting feature makes it able to wrestle it out indirectly.