• Rise of China, Real-World Benchmarks Top Supercomputing Agenda

    February 7, 2017

    The United States for years was the dominant player in the high-performance computing world, with more than half of the systems on the Top 500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers being housed in the country. At the same time, most HPC systems around the globe were powered by technologies from such major US tech companies as Intel, IBM, AMD, Cray and Nvidia.

    That has changed rapidly over the last several years, as the Chinese government has invested tens of billions of dollars to expand the capabilities of the country’s own technology community and with a promise to spend even …

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  • Measuring Top Supercomputer Performance in the Real World

    June 21, 2016

    When we cover the bi-annual listing of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, the metric at the heart of those results, the high performance Linpack benchmark, the gold standard for over two decades, is the basis. However, many have argued the benchmark is getting long in tooth with its myopic focus on sheer floating point performance over other important factors that determine a supercomputer’s value for real-world applications.

    This shift in value stands to reason, since larger machines mean more data coursing through the system, thus an increased reliance on memory and the I/O subsystem, among other factors. While raw floating …

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  • Supercomputing Benchmarks Bending in New Directions

    November 25, 2015

    Whether it is IBM with the data-centric approach to next generation supercomputers or Intel with its scalable systems framework, there is little doubt that these and other major players in HPC are thinking differently about how to architect and benchmark systems in a way that balances floating point performance with the other equally important leg of the stool—data movement.

    Accordingly, the emphasis within the supercomputing community on the LINPACK benchmark, which serves as the most well-known metric for determining the relative performance of the top systems on the planet, is shifting. This is not to say that LINPACK and the …

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