Significant business and architectural changes can happen with 10X improvements, but the real milestones upon which we measure progress in computer science, whether it is for compute, storage, or networking, come at the 1,000X transitions. …
Let’s just cut right to the chase scene. The latest Top500 ranking of supercomputers, announced today at the SC21 supercomputing conference being held in St Louis, needed the excitement of an actual 1 exaflops sustained performance machine running the High Performance Linpack benchmark at 64-bit precision. …
As we head toward the annual Supercomputing Conference season we wanted to take a moment for a level-set on exascale. …
There was an outside chance that China might pull a surprise on the HPC community and launch the first true exascale system – meaning capable of more than 1 exaflops of peak theoretical 64-bit floating point performance if you want to be generous, and 1 exaflops sustained on the High Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark if you don’t – but that didn’t happen. …
There may not be a lot of new systems on the November 2020 edition of the Top500 rankings of supercomputers, but there has been a bunch of upgrades and system tunings of machines that have been recently added, expanding their performance, as well as a handful of new machines that are interesting in their own right. …
There is a constant push and pull between budget and architecture in supercomputing, and the passing of time has not made anyone’s arms tired as yet on both sides of the bargaining table. …
Things get a little wonky at exascale and hyperscale. Things that don’t matter quite as much at enterprise scale, such as the cost or the performance per watt or the performance per dollar per watt for a system or a cluster, end up dominating the buying decisions. …
The latest list of the world’s top 500 floppiest supercomputers was released this week and the biggest news to report is that there is almost no news to report. …
When the TOP500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers comes out twice a year, the top-ranked machines receive the lion’s share of attention. …
If you want to rank in the world of supercomputing – as national and state governments as well as academic and research institutions most certainly do to prove their worth for research and development – then you need to have at least a petaflops ante now to play the game. …
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