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What's with $JVN's obsession with speed? FLOPs isn't so much a measure of speed, as it is a measure of computational power. And what's with the weasel wording suggesting that Linux is the reason for it? Jaguar has more than double the amount of cores Roadrunner does, but only provides a 70% performance increase, while both operate at only 75% efficiency (maximum sustained FLOPs vs. Peak operating FLOPs, vs. Theoretical maximum FLOPs). Also worth pointing out is that Jaguar eats up 3x the power that Roadrunner does.

Contrast Roadrunner, to say, JAXA (powered by OpenSolaris) ~12000 cores (vs. Roadrunner's ~122k cores) which operates at 90% efficiency, pumping out 40 GFLOPs/CPU vs. Roadrunner's 12. less than 10% the amount of cores, for more than 10% the output, and more than 3x the output per CPU.

Contrast that to the Super-UX powered Earth Simulator 2, which operates at an astounding 93% efficiency, pumping out 102 GFLOPs/CPU, with a paltry 1280 cores, 1% the amount of cores (compared to RoadRunner), dishing out 10% of the computational power (FLOPs). Even a JAXA-sized cluster would put Roadrunner to shame, and rival Jaguar.

It's fun to focus on only one set of numbers, while ignoring the big picture, and to pretend that it means something else. The more CPUs you toss at a cluster, the more FLOPs it's going to generate, regardless of the OS. You'd expect a cluster utilizing 100x the cores, would put out 100x the FLOPs, but obviously, this isn't the case, 122,000 cores pumping out a petaFLOP is impressive on the surface, but not nearly as much so as 1280 cores punching way above it's weight and putting out 130 TFLOPs.

Similarly a cluster of 224,000 cores cores putting oput 1.7 PFLOPs may be impressive on the surface, until you notice the gross inefficiency.

Beyond that, there's the denial over the distinction between CNL 1 (which IIRC powers Jaguar) and CNL2, where SLES is used on the slave nodes, while all of the heavy lifting is done by the UNICOS kernel), and there's no mention of Jaguar's proprietary interconnect, which I'd hate to break it to you, but the interconnect is much more important regarding efficiency than the operating system itself.

Then there's the dually misleading headline “fastest” while talking about computational power, rather than speed, and “computers” as though these are massive NUMA systems rather than clusters. Sorry, Steven, the “fastest” computer in the world is actually the Sun/Fujitsu-Siemens 64-way SPARCVII-based behemoth that is the M9000, clocking in over a TeraFLOP on a single board (targeted at the enterprise, not HPC mind you), which currently holds the record for the most powerful single computer.

The “fastest” supercluster, however is Jaguar, which is powered by a proprietary interconnect, and has UNICOS at its core. And Linux is nowhere near setting efficiency records. That's Solely between NEC and Sun/Fujitsu, otherwise Roadrunner and Jaguar would have breached the 10 PetaFLOP barrier by now. (Something Fujitsu-Siemens plans to do within the next two years, might I add).

Thanks for playing.

by Meike Chabowski, product marketing manager, SUSE Linux Enterprise

In June and November of each year the Top500 list of supercomputers is released. Each year, based on the list, the key operating system for supercomputing is Linux. Linux is cheaper to run and its excellent scalability features, along with its robust security and performance, make it an ideal choice for high performance computing (HPC) systems.

The recently released November Top500 list once again demonstrates that Linux dominates HPC – nearly 90 percent of the Top500 systems run on Linux. Three hundred and ninety-one of these systems are running an unspecified version of Linux. Sixty-two of the supercomputers are proven to run some version (including such variants as UNICOS/lc and CNL) of SUSE Linux Enterprise from Novell. Red Hat and its derivatives, including CentOS, comes in a distant second with 16 supercomputers.

The world’s fastest supercomputer, the Jaguar XT5, built by Seattle-based Cray Inc., runs on a version of SUSE Linux Enterprise. Jaguar, which is located at the Department of Energy’s Leadership Computing Facility at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is used by the National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) for simulation and computations for environmental, chemical and material science, nuclear energy, astrophysics and particle physics. Jaguar literally has “blown away” its competitors by bringing the theoretical peak of performance speed to 2.3 petaflops: one petaflop/s refers to quadrillion calculations per second — second place Roadrunner from IBM in comparison just reaches 1.3 Petaflops. All the Jaguar computer nodes somewhere run a version of  SUSE Linux Enterprise Server — lightly-customized SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 on the service nodes, and Compute Node Linux (CNL) which is Cray’s version of the SUSE Linux Enterprise operating system with a tuned Linux kernel.

Why is SUSE Linux Enterprise Server the operating system of choice on most of the world’s top HPC supercomputers in use today? Since 1993, SUSE engineers have made significant contributions to the advancement and tuning of the Linux kernel and key kernel-related performance technologies. Moreover, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server was the first Linux OS in the market to support 64-bit chip sets and is synonymous with high-performance Linux running on 64-bit and mainframe systems. Because of its continuous early support of newer chip sets, including 64-bit, this drove and still drives the success of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server on HPC technologies.

The HPC market is maturing from high performance to high productivity. While the world’s fastest supercomputer Jaguar is devoted to solving scientific questions, there have been significant changes in the high performance computing landscape during the last few years. Many businesses today are adopting HPC for financial analysis, portfolio management, digital security, surveillance, data warehousing, line-of-business applications and transaction processing. And while HPC has been primarily limited to large enterprises, R&D firms, and academic institutions in the past, that is changing. Mid-market companies are also adopting HPC, due to the availability of affordable and open solutions, which supplant the costly proprietary solutions of the past.

This entry was posted
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