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The Top500 2012 – The winner is: TITAN

Supercomputer are mostly one’s nation to show, we can compute numbers
as fast as possible. While last year, the fastest supercomputer was situated
in Asia, it is now again situated in the USA. The Oak Ridge National
Laboratory has built up and finally activated the fastest supercomputer.

With none less than 17’590’000’000’000’000 floating point operations/s (17.59 PFlops/s) theTitan as this supercomputer is called, calculates twice as fast as BlueGene in Asia.

Can you remember my last Top500 post, where I wondered about using actual GPUs to do the fast calculation?

Theoretically, a GPU like the 6990 could do aolut 4 TFlops/s however with all the interconnections, a speed loss is usual.

The Titan is equipped with NVidia K20 GPU CUDA cards which serve the sole purpose of doing distributed numbercrunching.

None less than 18’688 of these, assisted by 18’688 AMD6274-Opteron CPUs (each having 16 cores btw!), the total power consumption is a mere 8.21 Megawatts.
So my theoretical idea of using actual GPU cores to do all the number crunching, has been picked up and put into Titan.

Just soon AMD announces the FirePro S10000, a very fast GPU for servers which also offers high potential in cluster computing. With a theoretical computing power of 1.48TFlops/s using double precision or a whopping 5.91 TFlops/s using single precision, this card may outwit the K20 Tesla GPU card. However the AMD card will most likely consume up to 375 Watts. While the K20 Tesla is supposed to be a pure computing card (no display connectors), the FirePro S10000 will be a fully-blooded server and workstation GPU with tremendous graphics power. Hence the price of nothing less than 3700 US$.

AMD FirePro S10000 – the K20x-Killer?

And another comparison chart:

How the S10000 competes with NVidia.

Yet I wonder how the K20x Tesla GPU card is performing when it comes to pure calculation power as shown in the chart above.

Interesting to see such powerful hardware to drain only ⅔ of the power. Comparison is again made against BlueGene.

Again there’s one question: What is done with all the cumputing power, the USA has actually built up? Half of all Top500 supercomputers are from USA.

Interesting to see that Jüllich has installed the Number 3 of the fastest supercomputers in the world. So the first three rankings go to USA and Europe.

Update November 12th:

Now the stats for the NVidia Tesla K20 series are available. So let’s do an all-Overview chart:

 


November 11, 2012 Netspark - 1594 posts - Member since: May 9th, 2011 No Comments »

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