So the latest Top 500 list is out, so why doesn’t it excite me as much as it used to. Well partly cause many of those machines are not easily accessible, while other computing resources are within reach. Perhaps partly because for a lot of the work I am interested in doing, you don’t really need a machine in the top 500. Of course, having access to a machine there allows you to address some problems you couldn’t any other way, and IMO they should only be used for such problems.
One of the better posts about this years list comes from Chris Peters at Intel. He presents a different perspective on the list and notes some trends. For example, the 10th fasted machine on this years list drives more FLOPS than all 500 machines on the 2000 list.
While the post has a definite Intel angle to it, Chris notes the point I made earlier. Today, massive computing resources are available a lot more easily, you have new software stacks, whether for clustering, or for massive data-intensive computing. Personally, I think how we consume computing and the nature of our compute codes is going to go through a transformation in the next decade and more people are going to be doing large scale computing and solving interesting problems.
Will the Top 500 list become meaningless? Not really. There is always room for massive floating point performance and certain problems for which you just need the kind of raw horsepower that the big iron provides. For others, we have a lot of resources that we can get our hands on.
The big machines
So the latest Top 500 list is out, so why doesn’t it excite me as much as it used to. Well partly cause many of those machines are not easily accessible, while other computing resources are within reach. Perhaps partly because for a lot of the work I am interested in doing, you don’t really need a machine in the top 500. Of course, having access to a machine there allows you to address some problems you couldn’t any other way, and IMO they should only be used for such problems.
One of the better posts about this years list comes from Chris Peters at Intel. He presents a different perspective on the list and notes some trends. For example, the 10th fasted machine on this years list drives more FLOPS than all 500 machines on the 2000 list.
While the post has a definite Intel angle to it, Chris notes the point I made earlier. Today, massive computing resources are available a lot more easily, you have new software stacks, whether for clustering, or for massive data-intensive computing. Personally, I think how we consume computing and the nature of our compute codes is going to go through a transformation in the next decade and more people are going to be doing large scale computing and solving interesting problems.
Will the Top 500 list become meaningless? Not really. There is always room for massive floating point performance and certain problems for which you just need the kind of raw horsepower that the big iron provides. For others, we have a lot of resources that we can get our hands on.
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