How do you measure a supercomputer’s speed?
Adrian Giordani asks what benchmarks should be applied as the nature of supercomputing changes on the way to exascale
I
n July, the latest edition of the Top500 list, which ranks the most powerful supercomputers in the world, will be published. Tere is little room to doubt that,
as in the list published in November 2014, the number one spot will be held by the Tianhe-2 based at the National Super Computer Centre in Guangzhou, China. Te system has a theoretical performance that is 419,102 times faster than the fastest systems available when the first Top500 list was published way back in 1993. Te Top500 bi-annual list uses the widely accepted Linpack benchmark to monitor the
performance of the fastest supercomputer systems. Linpack measures how fast a computer will solve a dense n by n system of linear equations. But, the tasks for which high-performance
computers are being used are changing and so future computations may not be done with floating-point arithmetic alone. Tere has been a growing shiſt in the practical needs of computing vendors and the supercomputing community. Other benchmarks have emerged. Te Green500 lists supercomputers in terms of energy efficiency: as Linpack flops-per-watt, for example.
Nonetheless, the goal for the HPC community
is to create an Exaflop machine, and the measure of Exaflop (a billion billion calculations a second) derives from the Linpack way of thinking. Te first Exaflop system may be within reach within the next decade provided novel computing architectures are introduced to deal with power issues, which is the primary design constraint. But, calling the system ‘exa-anything’ is a bad
idea because it sets the scientific computing community up for perceived failure if Exaflops are not reached, according to Horst Simon,
22 SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING WORLD
@scwmagazine l
www.scientific-computing.com
NCSA and the University of Illinois
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