IBM has obliterated the competition in the supercomputing stakes with the top 10 of the top 500 supercomputers in the world, but Microsoft has surprisingly scraped in at number 23 with its Windows HPC Server system. While Microsoft is an unlucky 13 numbers away from the top 10, does the wow start now?
Microsoft can’t claim any particular ‘wow’ with its results until it can wrest a top 10 position, let alone the No.1 position away from IBM, but 23 isn’t too bad when we’re talking about a list of 500.
But the real news isn’t about Microsoft, it’s about IBM’s stunning top 10 wipeout of the competition, starting with IBM’s super speedy RoadRunner and its PETAflop of performance and power at the top of the tree, and four of its venerable Blue Gene systems also making the top 10 list.
Other supercomputer heavyweights Sun, Cray, SGI (twice) and Hewlett-Packard have also figured on the leader board, as expected.
But it’s not just the USA that is home to the world’s five fastest computers – Germany, Indian and France can also claim the kudos of a top 10 placing.
Sadly for us Aussies, we’re completely absent from the Top 500 list, although we could well be in the running for a 2009 placing.
Why? Because next year, the University of Melbourne plans to “develop the most powerful supercomputer and leading computational biology facility dedicated to life sciences research in the world.”
The university’s vice-chancellor, Professor Glyn Davis, said “The far reaching vision and scale of this initiative will combine Victoria’s already globally competitive biomedical research capability with computational infrastructure specially designed for the life sciences, equal to the best in the world.”
But what was that about Windows HPC Server, and all that ‘wow’?
Well, even though the Windows HPC Server software hasn’t quite reached release candidate stage (which reminds us of the time it took Vista to come to market) it is used on the number 23 supercomputer.
What’s it loaded onto? The NCSA’s ‘Abe’ supercomputer, powered by a Dell PowerEdge cluster with a peak performance of 88.3 teraflops. It’s far, far from the one PETAflop of IBM power, but it’s still the 23rd most powerful computer in the world.
But to put that into perspective, it’s roughly one-quarter of the performance of the number 2 supercomputer (an IBM Blue Gene at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) and less than one-eleventh of Roadrunner’s.
So Microsoft still has a long way to go, but it’s also the actual hardware that’s important. Dell aren’t using the IBM Cell processor, after all.
And Abe isn’t exclusively running Windows either. While it is the fastest Windows cluster to date, Abe also runs Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4!
“Our experience with Windows HPC Server 2008 has been impressive,” said Robert Pennington, deputy director of the NCSA.
“Deploying it was much easier than we expected, and the performance results have surpassed our expectations. When we deployed Windows on our cluster, which has more than 1000 nodes, we went from bare metal to running the LINPACK benchmark programs in just four hours. The performance of Windows HPC Server 2008 has yielded efficiencies that are among the highest we’ve seen for this class of machine.”
Microsoft will also be happy to see that two other Windows HPC systems made the top 100.
Sweden’s Umea University runs its IBM BladeCenter cluster of 672 blade servers on Windows HPC, the first time the system software has been publicly run on IBM hardware.
Big Blue is enthusiastic: “By working closely together on Windows HPC Server 2008, our customers are already seeing improved efficiency rates,” said Dave Jursik, vice president of supercomputer sales at IBM.
“This industry partnership with Microsoft plays a vital role in achieving our goal to create powerful cluster solutions that address the growing needs of researchers such as the scientists at Umea.”
Of course, it’s easy for IBM to be so gracious when they otherwise wipe the floor with Microsoft’s efforts.
And just slipping in at number 100 is Germany’s Universitaet Aachen/RWTH with a Fujitsu Siemens Primergy cluster.
The release candidate of Windows HPC Server 2008 is to be made available for download in the last week of June.
If only you could get all those old 486 and Pentium machines out of your garage to give the HPC Server 2008 a go! But sadly that will be a firm no-go.
For any super-speedy hardware and performance, forget Microsoft – and look to acquiring a large stack of IBM Cell processors to make your own RoadRunner. Beep Beep!
Tags: Technology
