It’s that time of the year again: the Top 500 list of supercomputers has been published, as they do every six months. Just for fun, I decided to compare the list released this month to then-current list when OSNews launched; we started in August 1997, so let’s compare the list of today to the one from June 1997.
There are two comparisons that I find most interesting. First of all, when we look at processor architectures, it’s pretty clear that Intel has more or less taken over the entire market, with a massive x86 dominance. I can assure you that predicting today’s x86 dominance in the Top 500 list in 1997 would’ve won you a talk with the men in white coats.
When we look at operating systems, it becomes quite obvious that Linux has taken over the Top 500 list. AIX powers 21 machines, and Windows HPC 2008 does 5 of them. There’s an OpenSolaris machine, and a Super-UX one, and the rest is all Linux (or at least partly Linux, such as Cray’s UNICOS/lc).
So, the supercomputing market is more or less standardising on x86 and Linux – exactly, commodity hardware.
OS family 06/97
http://www.top500.org/charts/list/9/osfam
06/09
http://www.top500.org/charts/list/33/osfam
Comments: Why didn’t you just steal the charts
?
And I still hate the EM64T name. The thing should be called AMD64, because AMD made it.
Well, because they don’t have any data labels. I don’t like pie charts without data labels. On top of that, making charts and tables is fun.
I mean that
.
Edited 2009-06-25 11:38 UTC
In that case I’d appreciate it if the labels could be made correctly (x86_64 != x68_64).
I’m on 64-bit Red Hat 4; I can’t easily install flash, which those charts use. I’m glad he didn’t steal them.
You should however be able to install gnash. Gnash is now up to its 4th beta release:
http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/
As it says, not everything works, but having said that, a lot of flash that is on the web does in fact work.
Gnash 0.8.5 has fixed quite a bit of the problem of integration with browsers, so it not only plays flash now, it can nearly always download it too. Thats a bonus.
AMD64 (or x86-64) and EM64T are not the same thing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64#Differences_between_AMD64_and_I…
those are differences in implementation, not design. Intel was forced to base EM64T off AMD64 due to pressure from MS.
Actually, the chart *does* call it AMD64 – at least, when talking about AMD. The EM64T label is only used for Intel hardware…
Right, so finally we know where to go to get the full and proper Crysis experience!
Well, no.
A supercomputer isn’t a computer – it’s a large number of individual computers cooperating as a cluster. With this in mind you could probably get a collection of 20 billion Commodore 64’s and connect them all together, and be in the top 500 list without actually being able to run any modern software… 😉
-Brendan
Well, no.
They didn’t make 20 billion Commodore 64’s.
Well, yes.
It was a joke. Get a sense of humor.
Edited 2009-06-25 17:01 UTC
I think he was joking too.
😀
Edited 2009-06-25 21:15 UTC
You shouldn’t joke about having 20 billion C64’s. Its just cruel. My mind goes wild with delirious dreams of writing parallel programs on the array in Basic with chocked full of enough peeks and pokes to make perl look as readable as Dick & Jane.
One Day…. How well is C64 supported by virtual machines? anyone know?
Do schools still use Sally, Dick, and Jane? I suppose they now have smart phones and iPods. And Spot probably has a GPS transponder implant. What was the cat’s name? I can’t remember.
Edited 2009-06-28 17:53 UTC
I don’t know, because it was pretty obvious over ten years ago that all the proprietary Unix vendors with hardware to protect would do absolutely anything to ensure their Unix operating systems would not run on any x86 system. The Unix they all feared ended up being Linux, all the big Unix and hardware vendors went into denial apart from IBM, and it is interesting to see how many of those companies producing hardware on that list in 1997 have now either gone bust or are in serious trouble.
Some saw the signs (SGI) and converted their hardware to Linux. The Altix machines are good vertical number crunchers.
it’s a pity they still seem to be in trouble.
On the other hand, currently you can get a 4 core, 24 GB RAM machine for €2000,-, and lots of calculations actually can be handled by these machines.
If I scale this money to a 16 core, 96 GB RAM SGI Altix, then the Altix should cost no more than €8000,-
Unfortunately with that machine configuration you get nowhere near that price.
I hope Microsoft programming continues to demand higher and higher power machines, so that consumers continue to demand stronger and stronger machines, so that those machines reach the consumer sector and give me the opportunity to run Linux on those then cheap machines and do number-crunching on it.
And still none of them can calculate pi to a repeating digit.
I bet with the right modifications to the FP chip you could.
Pi is an irrational transcendental number and, as so, doesn’t has a repeating sequence. If you find one you must keep calm and revise your calculation.
Anyway, I guess you know it.
Edited 2009-06-25 22:43 UTC
Yes. It was merely a joke.
I like the diversity. I have worked on Sparc, Power, MIPS, Alpha, Itanium and Cray machines (all having some form of Unix) and it was quite fun to have all the little and big differences, different development tools, design decisions etc. Now most systems are basic Linux, which makes things easier but also more boring. Back to diversity!
Lucky for you not all Linux distributions are the same.
It’s however good to have most of the use the same gnu utils, so atleast when we have a shell script call tar it always uses the same options.
… a sizeable chunk of the top 5oo supercomputers will be run on cellphone chips! Think ARM…
Very custom hardware with a Linux kernel moulded to fulfil a given task – I don’t want to start an anti-Linux thread but I do think that people need to realise that it doesn’t say anything about Linux other than the ability to have access to source code and being able to make incredible optimisations and tweaking because of it.
Linux was in the right place at the right time; there are many other open source operating systems that, had it gained the momentum that Linux did in the early days – would be just as likely to have jumped into the top 500. A lot of what we see today is thanks not just to GNU/Linux and the talent behind it but also a reasonable amount of good luck.
It’s not anti-linux to note what is in fact the result of both its versatility and fortunate timing. I hope to see more processor and OS diversity on this list in ten years.
Unfortunately on this website there is a habit by individuals to mark down anything that doesn’t mark Linux as the pinnacle of perfection – if there are problems, its always the end users fault rather than flaws in the system itself (as seen with the review of Linux on my Acer Aspire One a few months ago).