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."

I'm looking forward to the..

[mrbluze]

2013 Calendar full of naked supercomputers displaying their petaflops!

Obligatory

[Andrio]

Obligatory "Crysis Max Settings" joke.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Missed. Titan has NVIDIA GPU's.

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.

Counting artifacts...

[Anubis350]

Bear in mind, part of it has to do with *how* cores are counted. I wasn't at the top500 announcement this year (didnt have the time to head to SLC for a week, wish I did), so I can't speak to if they discussed it, but at previous SC top500 announcements in the past few years they've stressed the difficulty in reconciling core counts between GPUs and CPUs, including (last I heard) settling on a 4:1 GPU vector procs:cpu equivalent ratio for NVIDIA cards.

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[fatphil]

I'm not sure the number of cores is reliable. One figure said a quarter of a million nvidea cores. That works out at 100 boards (2.5kcores/board). Another figure from an other article
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6421/inside-the-titan-supercomputer-299k-amd-x86-cores-and-186k-nvidia-gpu-cores
claimed Titan was 18k opteron with 18k nvideas, one each. The latter implies 50 million of nvidea cores.

As the latter has a photo of a rack, with 4 opterons (16 cores each) plus 4 nvideas (2688 cores each), I'm much mor

Re:

[sortius_nod]

You forgot the hot grits & Natalie Portman!

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[Anonymous Coward]

Obligatory "beowulf" joke.

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.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

look at it this way: if they hadn't split their acquisition into 2 separate 391 (Rpeak) TFLOPS systems, they'd probably be good enough for #36.

Redudundant expression

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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[mozumder]

Maybe they mean the number of anti-fur ad campaigns that somehow backfired per second?

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[rubycodez]

thank goodness for that, I enjoy the 70s porn

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[psyhofreak]

I suspect that miller60 enjoys driving his car at 60 MPH per hour.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Thank you so much. It grated on me so much, I came here to whinge about it. Now instead of being a complainant, I can merely congratulate you and look good. :)

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[froggymana]

Maybe they're measuring the acceleration of it's floating point operations!

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[Latentius]

Man, if it's operating at 17 petaflops per second, just think how fast it'll be by this time next year!

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[tbird81]

Go easy on the author. This is politics discussion site, so not all of us understand basic computing terms.

That's some accelleration...

[eth1]

more than 17 petaflops a second.

Wait... 17 petaflop per second per second?! How long can it keep that up?

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[stackOVFL]

For a fortnight per furlong

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[Alwin Henseler]

About 1.59 seconds, until it reaches 27.113 petaflops? Then it should decelerate about 0.56 seconds, stabilizing at 17.59 petaflops.

0 to max in 1.6 seconds, sounds like an awfully fast car^H^H^H machine.

Petaflops a second?

[afidel]

Quadrillions of operations per second per second? So these machines only do scalar operations? I thought Linpack was a matrix test =)

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[dzelenka]

does it run Linux?

If you follow the links in the article you will see that they all run Linux, or a Linux variant.

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[drkim]

Between all the time it takes to upgrade these beasts, and the time spent running proper benchmarks, how much time is available to run actual jobs?

Wadda ya mean, "actual jobs?"

They just built this to run Crysis 3.

Petaflops a second?

[JavaBear]

"with a Linpack benchmark of more than 17 petaflops a second"

Supercomputers calculate on an accelerating performance curve now?

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[gnasher719]

"with a Linpack benchmark of more than 17 petaflops a second"

Supercomputers calculate on an accelerating performance curve now?

Sure. Just the number is wrong. If the top computer does 17 petaflops, and the list is run for about 30 years = about 1 gigasecond, then the average growth is 17 megaflops per second. Actual growth was a lot more in the last year, and less before.

Re:

[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 t

My Macbook

[gnasher719]

would have made it onto the June 2000 supercomputer list, and would have made 2nd place in the June 1993 list, both with the CPU alone. At least if Dongarra wrote the Linpack code :-)

2.3 GHz, 4 cores, 256 bit vector registers, one add + one multiply per cycle throughput = 73.6 GFlop/s theoretical limit; with hyperthreading one should get quite close to that limit. Top 500 in June 2000 was only 44 GFlop/s, 2nd place in June 1993 was 30 GFlop/s.

Hmmm

[slick7]

Are we in a race to see just how fast we develop AI that will kick our asses? Skynet or the Forbin Project seem to be the goal.

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.