Top 500 supercomputers - rise of the Linux quad-cores2009-11-16 09:56 by DanielaTags: supercomputer, Linux
Looking at the semi-annual Top 500 list of supercomputers, you would never know the world was battling recession. Supercomputer centers keep chucking out old tech and rolling in new tech at the same feverish pace. The fall edition of the list was announced this morning at the SC09 supercomputing trade show in Portland, Oregon. The single biggest transition in the list is the move to quad-core - and in some notable cases, six-core - processors inside supercomputing systems. And most of the machines on the list now run Linux with x64 processors. The key differences between machines are what network interconnects and topologies are deployed and what adjunct processing elements (if any) are used to boost the performance of the central processors in server nodes. The differences are substantial enough for specific workloads to keep a whole bunch of HPC suppliers busy at a time in the market when you think there might be two suppliers left. According to the techies who put together the Top 500 rankings - Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim, Germany; Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; and Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee - there are 427 machines that have quad-core processors. Intel's "Nehalem-EP" Xeon 5500 processors have tripled their presence on the Top 500 list, to 95 machines, up from 33 in the June 2009 rankings and zip in the November 2008 rankings because the Xeon 5500s came a little later than expected to market in March of this year. Read more -here-
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