When it comes processors for supercomputing, it's mostly
either Intel or AMD. The server processors from both Intel
and AMD are racing neck to neck in performance. By market
share, Intel leads a lot over AMD, 402 out of top 500 supercomputers
are powered by Intel's processors. But the AMD processor
powers the rank number 1 in performance.
In the recently announced super computer rating by TOP500,
Cray's XT5 supercomputer known as Jaguar ranks number one
in performance beating IBM's Roadrunner.
The Jaguar is built using six-core AMD Opteron processors.
The mission-critical Jaguar system at Oak Ridge National
Laboratory delivers 2.3 petaflop/s theoretical peak performance
and 1.75 petaflop/s performance on the Linpack benchmark.
AMD processors are powering 4 of the Top 5 systems of this
list.
The TOP500 release states, Jaguar roared ahead with new
processors bringing the theoretical peak capability to 2.3
petaflop/s and nearly a quarter of a million cores. One
petaflop/s refers to one quadrillion calculations per second.
The latest top 10 super computer ranking goes like this:
1. Jaguar - Cray XT5-HE from Cray Inc.
2. Roadrunner - BladeCenter QS22/LS21 from IBM
3. Kraken XT5 - Cray XT5-HE from Cray
4. JUGENE - Blue Gene/P Solution from IBM
5. Tianhe-1 - NUDT TH-1 Cluster from NUDT China
6. Pleiades - SGI Altix ICE 8200EX from SGI
7. BlueGene/L - eServer from IBM
8. Blue Gene/P Solution from IBM
9. Ranger - SunBlade x6420 from Sun Microsystems
10. Red Sky - Sun Blade x6275 from Sun Microsystems
While AMD powers the most powerful supercomputer, Intel'
share in the list is far higher than AMD. Intel chips are
used in 20 of the top 50 super computers. Intel's Xeon quad-core
processors are powering 379 of this list.
Both Intel and AMD have announced new technologies for
this fast growing domain:
In the first half of 2010, Intel plans to launch a new
High Performance Computing (HPC) optimized processor Nehalem-EX
with six cores. Intel Ct software technology which will
be available by end 2009 enables parallel programming in
the C and C++ languages by automatically parallelizing source-code
across 100s of processors.
AMD plans to release 8- and 12-core x86 processors, the
AMD Opteron 6100 Series processor named "Magny-Cours"
with 4 channels of DDR-3 memory and new power management
and virtualization features in the first quarter of 2010.
AMD also plans to release new architecture called "Bulldozer"
in 2011 with modular core design to increase concurrency,
simultaneous commands and multi-threading capacity with
up to 16 dedicated cores.
With these levels of achievements, having supercomputers
on your laps is not far away, and also possible is the present
notebooks and netbooks computers available for a price of
few 10s of dollars, only due the effort of the super semiconductor
companies like this.
The hot applications areas for super computer are processing
hungry domains such as drug discovery, climate/environment
studies, astronomy/space research, biotechnology, and geology
and any such domains requiring huge amounts of data processing.
For more details on ranking visit www.TOP500.Org
