• What’s Ahead for Supercomputing’s Balanced Benchmark

    March 21, 2018

    We all know about the Top 500 supercomputing benchmark, which measures raw floating point performance. But over the several years there has been talk that this no longer represents real-world application performance.

    This has opened the door for a new benchmark to come to the fore, in this case the high performance conjugate gradients benchmark, or HPCG, benchmark.

    Here to talk about this on today’s episode of “The Interview” with The Next Platform is one of the creators of HPCG, Sandia National Lab’s Dr. Michael Heroux. Interestingly, Heroux co-developed HPCG with one of the founders of the Top …

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  • A Closer Look at 2016 Top 500 Supercomputer Rankings

    November 14, 2016

    The bi-annual rankings of the Top 500 supercomputers for the November 2016 systems are now live. While the top of the list is static with the same two Chinese supercomputers dominating, there are several new machines that have cropped up to replace decommissioned systems throughout, the momentum at the very top shows some telling architectural trends, particularly among the newcomers in the top 20.

    We already described the status of the major Chinese and Japanese systems in our analysis of the June 2016 list and thought it might be more useful to look at some of the broader …

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  • Inside Six of the Newest Top 20 Supercomputers

    November 14, 2016

    The latest listing of the Top 500 rankings of the world’s most powerful supercomputers has just been released. While there were no big surprises at the top of the list, there have been some notable additions to the top tier, all of which feature various elements of supercomputers yet to come as national labs and research centers prepare for their pre-exascale and eventual exascale systems.

    We will be providing a deep dive on the list results this morning, but for now, what is most interesting about the list is what it is just beginning to contain at the top–and what …

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  • Competition Heats Up In Cluster Interconnects

    July 11, 2016

    Any time a ranking of a technology is put together, that ranking is always called into question as to whether or not it is representative of reality. Rankings, such as the Top 500 list of the top supercomputers in the world, has been the subject of such debate with regards to the Linpack Fortran performance benchmark that is used to create the rankings and its relevance to the performance of actual workloads. When it comes to networking, the changes in the list in recent years are likely a better reflection of what is going on in high performance computing in …

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  • A Look Inside China’s Chart-Topping New Supercomputer

    June 20, 2016

    Much to the surprise of the supercomputing community, which is gathered in Germany for the International Supercomputing Conference this morning, news arrived that a new system has dramatically topped the Top 500 list of the world’s fastest and largest machines. And like the last one that took this group by surprise a few years ago, the new system is also in China.

    Recall that the reigning supercomputer in China, the Tianhe-2 machine, has stood firmly at the top of that list for three years, outpacing the U.S. “Titan” system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. We have a more detailed analysis …

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