back to article What's big, blue, and short on Intel? The supercomputer world's podium: USA tops Top500 with IBM Power9

IBM can now officially boast it has built the world's two most powerful publicly known supercomputers. The Big Blue-powered 144 PFLOPS Summit and 95 PFLOPS Sierra systems took the top two spots, first and second respectively, in the biannual Top500 supercomputing list, beating out the massive Chinese 93 PFLOPS Sunway …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    K Machine

    I notice that the two big IBM machines use Infiniband. My favourite super computer is the Japanese K machine, that used a bespoke interconnect called Tofu. What was interesting about that machine was that the peak performance and sustained performance seemed to be pretty much the same - meaning the interconnect is pretty good (as one would expect for a six dimensional hypertoroid blended with a 4 dimensional hypercube).

    I wonder just how good Infiniband is in comparison, and whether a bespoke interconnect made part of the cores (like Tofu is in K) would push these big IBM machines even further.

    The nice thing about that if they did would be better machines for the rest of us! I'm already quite impressed by IBM bolting NVidia's custom link into Power9, quite a good feature that's helped with these machines I'm sure.

    Fujitsu are looking at a new supercomputer machine, this time using ARM cores. Who knows, perhaps they can get on the top again.

    And finally, 140 petaflops. Goodness me, that's a lot!

    1. whitepines
      Thumb Up

      Re: K Machine

      Infiniband really is that good. Plus Mellanox supports the CAPI low-latency interconnect technology so there's an added boost right there.

      If you want to experiment you can normally find Infiniband gear (and even POWER hardware) at reasonable prices. Most enlightening are the following two tests:

      1.) Ping from one host to the other. Note the latency.

      2.) Raw transfer bandwidth. Use RDMA (Linux supports this) and note the consistent speeds.

      1. seven of five

        Re: K Machine

        THIS --> RDMA <--THIS

        Nothing says latency and bandwith like accessing some other computers memory for read/write and actually being able achive something useful doing so. Lovely tech.

  2. Lt.Kije

    Names

    Very seriously impressive Willy waving.

    Glad to see the Douglas Adams school of machine names emerging ...

    Sunway TaihuLight

    Piz Daint Cray cluster

    Power9

    Volta GV100

    Mellanox Infiniband

    Epyc 7501

    Sugon TC8600

    Cavium ThunderX2

    1. BebopWeBop

      Re: Names

      With shades of Banks' space ships

      1. DuncanL

        Re: With shades of Banks' space ships

        Not really - if so they would be called things like

        Faster Then Your Mother

        Look At The Bandwidth On That

        or

        Not Compensating For Penis Envy At All

  3. Eddy Ito

    That Summit machine is quite impressive as it also ranked 3rd on the Green 500 list turning out 14.7 GFlops/Watt. While it's a way behind the leader, Shoubu system B which turned in 17.6 GFlops/Watt, it's still quite a feat to pull off #1 overall and #3 in green especially when the Sierra machine ranked 6th on the green list at 12.7 GFlops/Watt.

    As an aside, I really wish they wouldn't label the column GFlops/Watts as it potentially confuses the issue - how many watts?

    1. Wellyboot Silver badge

      It's in the list.

      @Eddy - Green 500 list, Summit shows = 9.783 megawatt which is quite toasty.

      Lots of info at the Oak ridge site

      https://www.olcf.ornl.gov/olcf-resources/compute-systems/summit/

      'Summ_it' will also rank high on the corny/cool puter name lists for a long time!

      1. Eddy Ito

        Re: It's in the list.

        Agreed, it's quite toasty indeed but still remarkable since many others in the top tier do far worse. Tianhe-2A, ranked 4th, uses twice the power and only manages half the score and only three others in the top 20 managed over 10 TFlops/Watt with Japan's ABCI coming very close at 14.4 TF/W.

        Hmm... I wonder what the mark has to be to make mining bitcoin profitable.

  4. poohbear

    "It runs Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.3." ... what, couldn't they get Gentoo installed?

    1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge
      Trollface

      Ans none of them run Windows 10. I wonder why?

  5. ColonelClaw
    Joke

    "the most powerful UK supercomputer was the Cray XC40 installation at the Meteorological Office in Exeter"

    Ah nice. I wonder what they use it for?

    1. yoganmahew
      Coat

      It takes a lot of horses to make weather this bad.

    2. gypsythief
      Linux

      I wonder what they use it for?

      I was on a tour of the Met Office a few years back. When they were showing us their shiny super-computer (only through a window in the door, we couldn't poke it), I asked if it was possible to play Tux Racer on it.

      And I was assured by the guide, that yes, it was!

  6. Lennart Sorensen

    The core counts for the Power9 boxes look to be totally wrong. I suspect they were counting threads instead of cores given they mention 4600 nodes with two 22 core Power9 chips each, which does not equal over 2 million cores. At 8 threads per core though (if that is the version of the power9 they are using) it gets close. The numbers for the second place machine don't even divide by 22 evenly, so that's just more wrong. Someone somewhere goofed.

    1. hellwig

      Re: Cores

      Are they counting the Tensor acceleration cores from the GPUs? According to NVIDIA, https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/tesla-v100/ there are 640 cores per GPU.

  7. fredesmite

    What are the costs of these machines ?

    The IBM Power9 likely requires a pile of gold bars

    1. whitepines

      Re: What are the costs of these machines ?

      Depends on what you want it for. Raptor Computing Systems seems to have small desktop machines and some whitebox servers available at decent prices, but I'm not sure if anyone could get a full Summit node for anything close to affordable ("Schedule a consultation" on the AC922 page isn't a good sign). Adding NVIDIA of course means the price will skyrocket due to NVIDIA's anti-competitive practices.

    2. Antron Argaiv Silver badge
      Happy

      Re: What are the costs of these machines ?

      If you have to ask, you can't afford one...

      ...but maybe buy it on the "core a month" plan?

    3. seven of five

      Re: What are the costs of these machines ?

      Depends. A small(ish), usable one (single socket Linux, 1 TB memory, some adapters and maybe local storage will be around 10k (EUR|USD|CAD|GBP).

      A proper server with a hundred cores, 8T Memory, a load of adapters and filled with licenses, maybe the same amount of on demand capacities already installed and five years of maintenance... around a million. YMMV.

      IBM pricing is *very* flexible. Back in the days when we bought three fully loaded z990 mainframes on launch, we were given "as many (2105) ESS as we wanted for "free""

      We took 22 :)

  8. Antron Argaiv Silver badge
    Happy

    Publicly Known

    To me, the two most interesting words in the article.

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