RSSAMD Moves Up Supercomputer List
By Ed Oswald | Published June 28, 2006, 12:09 PM
IBM said Wednesday that the company built 243 computers on the list of the world's top 500 supercomputers in the world. However, the bigger story may be AMD's continued rise in the rankings. While AMD processors are only in 81 supercomputers, that 's up dramatically from 25 last year.
Intel processor-based systems are down over the same period, from 333 to 301. Similarly, the Itanium processor has continued to become less relevant, falling from 79 last year to 37 systems as of the current report. Intel has been locked in a tight battle with AMD over the past year, and has seen its market share fall in desktops, laptops and now servers.
The world's most powerful supercomputer is the IBM Blue Gene/L, with a performance of 280.6 Teraflops. Two more IBM computers round out the list of the top three: the Blue Gene Watson at 91.29 teraflops, and the ASC Purple supercomputer at 75.76 teraflops.
IBM said that the company's low cost and flexible supercomputers were driving growth in the sector. "Whether we are talking about improving the accuracy of weather forecasts, designing better automobiles or improving disease research, we are seeing the advent of a new supercomputing age," Deep Computing vice president Dave Turek said.
Second to IBM is Hewlett Packard, with 154 systems. No other manufacturer had more than 5 percent of the list, or 25 systems. Even so, many smaller names were able to crack the top 10, including Silicon Graphics in fourth, Bull SA in fifth, Dell in sixth, and NEC/Sun in seventh, Cray in ninth, and NEC in tenth.
By operating system, Linux by far was the operating system of choice, covering 73 percent of the list. Unix was a distant second with 20 percent. Microsoft's Windows was only on two systems, with one of its computers based on Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 reaching a performance of 6 teraflops, placing it 131st on the list.
"Linux by far was the operating system of choice, covering 73 percent of the list."
"Microsoft's Windows was only on two systems"
wow,
i would never had guessed
linux is by far preferred over windows for supercomputers
i would have thought windows would have been on a few more at least.
guess that shows what linux can attain. now all it needs is a bigger userbase for home systems.
i just dabble with linux myself, i use windows primarily. although the latest abuntu is nice to use.
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|I don't think Windows'd be able to run or even install on most of those systems...it didn't even have a 64 bit version until just recently...
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|Actually NT4 ran on 64-bit and even the first beta of Windows 2000 ran on 64-bit.
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|What could surprise in terms of operating systems is the big advantage of linux over *Unix*, not over Windows. Unix was developped for these machines, linux became later the "PC" version of it.
These are supercomputers, not servers. Microsoft didn't have an OS for them since the NT3.5 for alpha-sparc. (if that counts as a supercomputer)
It will be interesting to see how Windows Compute Cluster Server ends being. The windows platform could allow a faster software development process. It only needs to be powerful. Yet, linux clusters have been there for many years already. (anyone says "beowulf"?)
About processors.. 81 is still far from 301, but interesting progression :)
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|Interesting...thank you. Wonder what the performance comparisons were....
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|They may have run on 64-bit processors but they were not 64-bit Operation Systems. It is like installing 32-bit version of XP on a 64-bit AMD processor. It will run, but it is not a 64-bit OS.
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|Windows 2000 DID have a 64-bit version--yes, a TRUE 64-bit version. NT4? You're kidding, right? That thing came out in 1996, and mainstream support (outside of critical updates) ended in 2001. There was no reason for microsoft to add that support when they don't even have NT 4.0 support for USB 1.1!
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|Not really all that surprising. Most supercomputing is obviously done for heavily computational tasks, tasks where every clock cycle makes a difference, tasks you don't gui information taking resources from.
Actually, there are a number of supercomputing tasks where the cluster does the work, but it is monitored from and results are reported on a windows machine.
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|> Windows 2000 DID have a 64-bit version--yes, a TRUE 64-bit version.
No it didn't. A true 64-bit OS provides applications with 64-bit memmory addressing. Which version of Windows 2000 did that?
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