As expected, this week's Supercomputing 12 show in Salt Lake City, Utah, had lots of a news. It announced the fastest system in the world and a different system that is the most power-efficient of the large computers.
As usual, the important TOP500 list is up and, as anticipated, the new Titan system at the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) took the top spot. It shows sustained performance of 17.5 petaflops (more than 17,500 trillion floating point operations per second) and peak performance of over 27 petaflops on the LINPACK benchmark. This system is based on a Cray XK7 system with 18,688 nodes, each containing a 16-core AMD Opteron 6274 and an Nvidia Tesla K20 graphics processing unit (GPU) accelerator.
In second place is the previous leader, the Sequoia system at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, based on IBM's BlueGene/Q system and its PowerPC CPUs. Third up is the "K computer" at Japan's RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science based on Fujitsu SPARC64 processors.
In addition to Titan, perhaps the most notable change is that the Stampede system at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at the University of Texas in Austin is the first supercomputer in the top 10 using Dell PowerEdge servers with Intel Xeon Phi processors. It comes in at 2.7 sustained petaflops, but is supposed to get to 10 petaflops when fully deployed next year.
Overall, there are now 23 systems on the list with a performance above one petaflop; just over four years ago there was only one. Sixty-two of the top 500 are now using accelerators or co-processors. Intel provides processors for 379 systems on the list, AMD Opteron is used in 61 systems, and IBM Power processors are used in 53 systems.
Also updated this week was the Green500 list, which ranks the most efficient computers based on flops per watt running the Linpack benchmark. This time, the top system is a relatively small cluster (#253 on the TOP500 list), the Beacon system run by the National Institute of Computational Science and the University of Tennessee. It is built using Appro's GreenBlades, each running 2.6GHz Xeon E5-2670 processors (8 cores/16 threads) and Xeon Phi 5110P co-processors, using the Infiniband FDR interconnects. This results in 2.5 gigaflops per watt.
Second place went to Saudi Arabia's Sanam system, which uses Adtech blades, Xeon E5-2650's and AMD FirePro S10000 accelerators. Third place went to the Titan system and fourth to a smaller but similar Cray system called Todi, based in Switzerland. It's interesting to see that the next 24 spots all go to systems built on the more homogeneous IBM BlueGene/Q architecture, running at 2.1GF/ watt. In general, it looks like performance and power requirements are both going up, but performance is growing more quickly.
There's also lots of product news, which I'll cover in my next post.