AMD, Intel and nVidia work in parallel on new supercomputers:
While PC labs across the world get very excited about 3DMark scores and the like, serious uber-geeks need to get their fix from Top500. This is a site that’s dedicated to letting everyone who the biggest of big
dogs is, when it comes to the ultimate willy-waving competition.
At the desktop/laptop level, people like to have more than one core and – toward the top end of AMD and Intel’s ranges – you can have 8 cores or 6 cores with 2 threads each (respectively). Performance levels are measured here in TeraFlops – or trillions of mini-number-crunching things happening every second. The advent of huge parallelism (plus SLi/CrossFire) in graphics cards kicked this era off around 6-7 years ago.
Come to the Top500 and you need to add ‘at least 3 more zeroes’ to the levels of performance.
Welcome to the land where we’re measuring how many ‘Quadrillion’ operations can be performance a second. When you hit 1,000 TeraFlops a second, you’re delivering a PetaFlop. Until recently, the record was held by the Japanese at just over 10 PetaFlops, but now that crown has swung back to IBM with a system called Sequoia (an IBM BlueGene/Q system installed at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory).
It uses over 1.5 million cores to deliver over 16 PetaFlops. In this market, Intel leads AMD and IBM for the processors used (76.8%, 12.6% and 11.6% respectively) – while more than 10% of the systems in the Top 500 list now use graphics cards to augment their scores with nVidia (53 systems) leading Cell (2), AMD (2) and Intel (1).
While the number of applications that need the kind of power that a Top500 system can deliver might be limited, the US government is not above a little artificial stimulation.
To that end, it has made multi-million dollar bonuses available to Intel, nVidia and AMD – to get them all keen and interested in working on systems that could, potentially, deliver ExaFlop computing – something that’s 1,000 times more powerful that the scale we use today.
To give you an idea of how much power that is, you would only get 123 PetaFlops if you harnessed all 500 of the world’s most powerful machines today. With that number of ‘cores’ all working together, no wonder energy conservation is such a hot topic.
While PC labs across the world get very excited about 3DMark scores and the like, serious uber-geeks need to get their fix from Top500. This is a site that’s dedicated to letting everyone who the biggest of big
dogs is, when it comes to the ultimate willy-waving competition.
At the desktop/laptop level, people like to have more than one core and – toward the top end of AMD and Intel’s ranges – you can have 8 cores or 6 cores with 2 threads each (respectively). Performance levels are measured here in TeraFlops – or trillions of mini-number-crunching things happening every second. The advent of huge parallelism (plus SLi/CrossFire) in graphics cards kicked this era off around 6-7 years ago.
Come to the Top500 and you need to add ‘at least 3 more zeroes’ to the levels of performance.
Welcome to the land where we’re measuring how many ‘Quadrillion’ operations can be performance a second. When you hit 1,000 TeraFlops a second, you’re delivering a PetaFlop. Until recently, the record was held by the Japanese at just over 10 PetaFlops, but now that crown has swung back to IBM with a system called Sequoia (an IBM BlueGene/Q system installed at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory).
It uses over 1.5 million cores to deliver over 16 PetaFlops. In this market, Intel leads AMD and IBM for the processors used (76.8%, 12.6% and 11.6% respectively) – while more than 10% of the systems in the Top 500 list now use graphics cards to augment their scores with nVidia (53 systems) leading Cell (2), AMD (2) and Intel (1).
While the number of applications that need the kind of power that a Top500 system can deliver might be limited, the US government is not above a little artificial stimulation.
To that end, it has made multi-million dollar bonuses available to Intel, nVidia and AMD – to get them all keen and interested in working on systems that could, potentially, deliver ExaFlop computing – something that’s 1,000 times more powerful that the scale we use today.
To give you an idea of how much power that is, you would only get 123 PetaFlops if you harnessed all 500 of the world’s most powerful machines today. With that number of ‘cores’ all working together, no wonder energy conservation is such a hot topic.
No comments:
Post a Comment