PCMag UK | Opinion
Supercomputer Ranks Largely Unchanged, But Sit Tight
25 Nov 2014, 7:55 p.m.
The most recent list of the world's fastest supercomputers didn't change much, but the annual Supercomputing show (SC14) featured lots of discussion about new systems on the list, as well as several high-performance computing announcements, like new accelerators from Intel and Nvidia.
China's Tianhe-2 supercomputer, which uses Intel Xeon CPUs and Xeon Phi accelerators, remained in first place on the Top500 list with peak performance of 54.9 teraflops (quadrillions of floating point operations per second). This year, in fact, the top nine systems were identical to the top new addition in 10th place—an unspecified U.S. government system machine that is a Cray CS-Storm powered by Intel Xeon E5-2660 v2 CPUs and Nvidia K40 GPUs, connected via Infiniband.
Further down the list, there were 78 new systems, although even this is a new record low. And overall, it appears that we are seeing a slowdown in the rate of growth of the aggregate power of the 500 systems.
The rankings of these systems are based on the LINPACK benchmark, although there are a number of efforts now around creating new benchmarks aimed at different kinds of computing. I found it interesting that in a speech at the show, Horst Simon, editor of the Top500 list, said that despite the goal of reaching an exascale computer—1 exaflops per second (roughly 1,000 petaflops)—by 2020, he believes it will likely take us until the end of 2024. In part this is because we will need more power-saving techniques—such as silicon photonics and 3D integration and packaging—to keep the power needed for an exascale system down to 20 megawatts. These are big systems.
Despite the lack of big changes at the top, we did hear a couple of new announcements—notably those from Intel and Nvidia, which could point the way towards faster machines.
Nvidia, whose GPUs and CUDA programming language really started the movement towards accelerators and coprocessors in high-performance computing, was all over the show with lots of systems. It currently offers the K40 accelerator and at the show announced the next version, the Tesla K80, which uses a dual-GPU approach to offer what the firm says is nearly two times higher performance and double the memory bandwidth of its predecessor.
Nvidia says the K80 offers 4,992 CUDA cores and 24 megabytes of RAM and has a peak capacity of 2.91 teraflops per board. It's interesting that the K80 is available now and that many of the systems makers are already offering systems with the board. For instance, Dell showed off its new PowerEdge C4130 servers, which let you fit up to four Nvidia accelerator boards (or Intel Xeon Phi accelerators) in a 1U server, with the K80 version offering up to 7.2 teraflops in each box. That's just a crazy amount of computing power in a rack (though one that would use a lot of energy and need a lot of cooling).
Meanwhile, Intel announced that the next version of its Xeon Phi chip—a version known as Knight's Landing for which the first commercial systems should start shipping next year—now has more than 50 customers planning to use the new processor version of the part (where the Xeon Phi acts as the system processor) in new supercomputers. Many more systems are using the coprocessor PCIe card version of the product.
Among the customers for Knights Landing are the Trinity supercomputer, a joint effort between Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories, and the Cori supercomputer, announced by The U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) National Energy Research Scientific Computing (NERSC) Center. Knight's Landing is supposed to offer about 3 teraflops of performance, and will integrate Intel's silicon photonics-based Omni-Path Fabric technology, which the company said would offer 100 Gbps line speed and up to 56 percent lower switch fabric latency than InfiniBand alternatives. (Note that the InfiniBand providers are now talking about new versions as well.)
Intel said the follow-up, known as Knight's Hill, will be built using Intel's 10nm process technology and use the next generation of the Omni-Path fabric. It will follow Knight's Landing, but the exact timing wasn't disclosed.
Not to be left out of the equation is AMD, which announced and was showing its FirePro S9150 single-CPU card, which it says can offer 2.53 teraflops of performance. This system, which is programmed using OpenCL, is already shipping.
In fact, a new supercomputer called L-CSC from the GSI Helmholtz Center, based on the S9150 GPUs and Intel Xeon 2690v2 10-core CPUs topped the new version of the Green500 list, which lists supercomputers in order of processing power per watt. This marked the first time a system was able to surpass 5 gigaflops/watt (billions of operations per second per watt). Note on that list, the second place system was the Suiren, powered by PEZY-SC many-core accelerators and Xeon CPUs; while the rest of the top 10 use Nvidia Tesla GPUs, showing the range of such systems.
There are other, more unusual options as well. Micron is showing its Automata chip, essentially a special purpose chip designed for pattern matching, for use in things like network security and genomics searching. This is being developed into a PCIe 3 board with 32 chips and is slated to launch in the first quarter of 2015, initially in low volumes. (The company is also behind its Hybrid Memory Cube for next-generation memory for such systems.) IBM has its TrueNorth processor, which it hopes points the way to more "brain-like computing." NEC is working on the next generation of its SX-ACE vector processor, which it says is easier to program than GPUs. And, of course, ARM is trying to get into the server market as well with Applied Micro's X-Gene1 being used as a processor connecting to various accelerator cards.
A number of vendors were showing new systems. In addition to the Dell system I mentioned earlier, Lenovo showed a water-cooled dual-processor system based a custom Intel Xeon E5-2798A processor (with 16 cores running up to 3.2GHz), which it said delivers 1.083 teraflops. And it said that next year's Knights Landing Xeon Phi processor will enable a "peta-cube" system that delivers more than one petaflop in just two standard 42U racks.
One Stop Servers showed a High Density Compute Accelerator, which uses PCIe Gen3 to support up to 16 high-end accelerator boards from a single or multiple servers, with the company saying it provides up to 89.6 teraflops using Tesla K80 boards. This can work with IBM's Power8 processor. Huawei was showing the U.S. availability of its X6800 Data Center Server and a liquid-cooled version of its FusionServer 9000 blade server.
For linking together systems, Obsidian Technologies launched its InfiniCortex initiative, designed to take a 100 Gigabit InfiniBand connection over long distances. The company announced support from Singapore's Agency for Science, Technology, and Research (A*STAR). And Mellanox showed 100 Gigabit Infiniband working over 100 meters via fiber and 8 meters via copper.
To create the largest supercomputers, organizations typically turn to companies like IBM and Cray to put the systems together, though these often take years to build. Cray's biggest announcement of the kind at the show was an $80 million system known as Shaheen II at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia for a Cray XC40, including a Urika-GD graph analytics appliance.
And, of course, just prior to the show, the DOE awarded IBM (and component vendors Nvidia and Mellanox) a huge contract for what would be the two largest supercomputers in the country, each with more than 100 petaflops.
Michael Miller Michael_Miller@ziffdavis.com
Michael J. Miller's Forward Thinking Blog: forwardthinking.pcmag.com
Michael J. Miller is chief information officer at Ziff Brothers Investments, a private investment firm. From 1991 to 2005, Miller was editor-in-chief of PC Magazine, responsible for the editorial direction, quality and presentation of the world's largest computer publication.
Until late 2006, Miller was the Chief Content Officer for Ziff Davis Media, responsible for overseeing the editorial positions of Ziff Davis's magazines, websites, and events. As Editorial Director for Ziff Davis Publishing since 1997, Miller took an active role in helping to identify new editorial needs in the marketplace and in shaping the editorial positioning of every Ziff ... See Full Bio
More From Michael Miller
Traveling with a Second Monitor
How To Prepare Workers For the Jobs of the Future
The Myth and Reality of How AI is Changing Work
The Top Supercomputers Remain the Same; New Technology Shows A Road to Exascale
Microsoft Research: Machine Teaching, Optical Computing, Machine-Human Interaction, and More