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AxelKloth
Energy-efficient does not mean low power. It means a better quotient of MIPS or ...
jaybus
The A57 is supposed to deliver 3x the performance of a15. Of course that means ...
Intel's Xeon Phi cracks top 500 supercomputers
Rick Merritt
11/12/2012 9:00 AM EST
3-D stacks and interconnects
IBM technologists claim the accelerator approach won’t scale to the next big leap of exascale-class systems. Such systems will require new architectures that use 3-D stacking of processors and memory, they say.
Indeed, “power is a big issue,” said Jack Dongarra, of the University of Tennessee, another researcher behind the Top 500. “Today the Titan is at 2 Gflops/W, but we need 50 Gflops/W at exascale,” he said.
Infiniband surpassed Ethernet as the cluster interconnect of choice in the current Top 500. InfiniBand was used in 226 systems, up from 209 systems six months ago. Gigabit Ethernet was used in 188 systems, down from 207.
InfiniBand-based systems also account for more than twice as much performance as Ethernet-based ones at 52.7 petaflops compared to 20.3 petaflops.
The list does not track use of gigabit versus 10G Ethernet. Dongarra, said 10GE is now economical but provides less bang for the buck as 40G Infiniband. He estimated networking for a small 16-node 10GE cluster costs about $17,500 compared to about $21,500 for 40G Infiniband.
Among other trends, Intel continues to supply most of the processors in the Top 500 (76 percent). AMD’s Opteron and IBM’s Power trail at 12 and 10.6 percent, respectively. CPUs with eight or more cores are on the rise at use in 46.2 percent of the systems.
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IBM technologists claim the accelerator approach won’t scale to the next big leap of exascale-class systems. Such systems will require new architectures that use 3-D stacking of processors and memory, they say.
Indeed, “power is a big issue,” said Jack Dongarra, of the University of Tennessee, another researcher behind the Top 500. “Today the Titan is at 2 Gflops/W, but we need 50 Gflops/W at exascale,” he said.
Infiniband surpassed Ethernet as the cluster interconnect of choice in the current Top 500. InfiniBand was used in 226 systems, up from 209 systems six months ago. Gigabit Ethernet was used in 188 systems, down from 207.
InfiniBand-based systems also account for more than twice as much performance as Ethernet-based ones at 52.7 petaflops compared to 20.3 petaflops.
The list does not track use of gigabit versus 10G Ethernet. Dongarra, said 10GE is now economical but provides less bang for the buck as 40G Infiniband. He estimated networking for a small 16-node 10GE cluster costs about $17,500 compared to about $21,500 for 40G Infiniband.
Among other trends, Intel continues to supply most of the processors in the Top 500 (76 percent). AMD’s Opteron and IBM’s Power trail at 12 and 10.6 percent, respectively. CPUs with eight or more cores are on the rise at use in 46.2 percent of the systems.
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MikeSmith2011
11/13/2012 12:23 AM EST
“There’s a need for energy efficient architectures,” .... Hmm, with all the hype around ARM maybe we might see A57/X-Gene in this space sometime this decade?
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voroshazi
11/14/2012 7:15 AM EST
Read this article from Blue Waters and Linpack test:
http://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/News/Stories/TOP500problem/
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AxelKloth
11/14/2012 1:36 PM EST
Energy-efficient does not mean low power. It means a better quotient of MIPS or GFLOPS per power unit used. Those numbers are published if the processors in question ran LINPACK or for I/O, a similar test.
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wsw1982
11/13/2012 5:16 AM EST
The ARM A57 is indeed a low power chip, but its' performance/watt is way lower than others.
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sols
11/13/2012 5:23 PM EST
What are the numbers? Anything publicly available?
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jaybus
11/14/2012 9:04 AM EST
The A57 is supposed to deliver 3x the performance of a15. Of course that means it would still need more cores than Xeon Phi. Interconnecting the cores also takes energy. I think it remains to be seen which is better in terms of performance/W.
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rick.merritt
11/13/2012 9:25 AM EST
Nvidia is being very quiet lately about its plans for a supercomputer-class chip using 64-bit ARM cores and its graphics processors. But they have the chops to create a shift here.
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