Supercomputing

IBM has most energy efficient supercomputers

The 5th annual list of the most energy efficient supercomputers was published recently. IBM took the top four spots and 18 out of the top 20. The Green500 list is dominated by BladeCenter clusters and the Power-based Blue Gene supercomputer.

The list is compiled and sorted by megaflops per watt. The winner was a BladeCenter QS22 Cluster out of the University of Warsaw in Poland running at about 536 megaflops per watt. Incidentally, the same cluster is ranked 422nd in the TOP 500 supercomputer list.

Perhaps most impressive of all the supercomputers is a BladeCenter QS22/LS21 cluster run by the U.S. Department of Energy. It is #1 on the TOP 500 list and #4 on the Green500 list.

AMD holds press conference to bash Intel before IDF

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) held a Web-based press conference Aug. 15 to formally attack Intel Corp. prior to the Intel Developers Forum (IDF) in San Francisco next week.

When AMD invited me to listen to a webcast regarding the IDF forum, I expected to hear some news; maybe their 45nm processor Shanghai would be coming out earlier than expected to make up for Barcelona’s delay? That would be big and would help AMD make up some ground in the processor product release wars against Intel.

Instead, the conference served as a means for AMD to plant the seeds of skepticism in the minds of IDF attendees before the conference. AMD executives spent the hour call marketing their existing processing and graphics technologies and bashing Intel.

Randy Allen, the SVP and GM for AMD’s computing solutions group, cited benchmarks showing AMD’s Opteron processors in good light, like the SPECweb 2005 benchmark showing Opteron Model 2356 and Model 8356 hold the top x86 Web performance records for two-and four-processor servers.

Allen also touted AMD’s virtualization assist technology, AMD-V with Nested Page Tables, which recieved high praise from a VMware engineer recently, and he noted that quad-core Opteron is being used in a total of seven of the top performing systems in the most recent Top 500 Supercomputers list, including the No. 1 IBM’s RoadRunner.

“We have our swagger back,” Allen said.

He failed to note, however, that AMD’s Opteron chips were used in only 56 systems (11.2%) on the list, which is down from 78 systems six months ago. Intel processors were used in 74.8% of the world’s supercomputers (about 374 systems), up 4% from six months ago.

When a reporter raised this issue during the press conference, Allen said that having Opteron used in the top performing computer and systems high on the list is more notable than the slip in the number of total systems on the top 500.

In addition to hyping AMD products, Allen also spent plenty of time directly attacking Intel, saying the company has an easy time innovating because it simply mimics AMD’s work.

“Intel adopted our power efficiency technology, our multicore technology and you will see them copying the Direct Connect Architecture and HyperTransport technologies we developed five years ago. … Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but it is also annoying.”

Surely, IDF conference goers will hear similar hype about Intel products from Intel executives next week and negative remarks about AMD.

The only mention of AMD’s processor on deck, 45-nanometer chip code-named Shanghai, was that it is scheduled for release later this year and will be delivered on time. Shanghai will consume 20% less power at idle than Barcelona and will have 6 MB of L3 cache (compared with Barcelona’s 2MB of L3 cache).

All in all, the press conference simply re-stated old AMD news.

Thanks for the re-cap, AMD. That is an hour of my life I’ll never get back. And if you just finished reading this blog, hopefully it’s only a few minutes of your time that you can never get back.

Supercomputers rank high on energy efficiency list

The third edition of the Green500 List includes more supercomputers than ever, showing that high performance can be achieved with power efficiency in mind.The first sustained petaflop supercomputer, IBM Corp.’s Roadrunner, the top-ranked supercomputer in the TOP500 list of supercomputers, also ranked third on the Green500 for its efficiency.

This proves that performance doesn’t have to come at a high energy price. Wu Feng, a member of both the computer science and the electrical and computer engineering departments in Virginia Tech’s College of Engineering and founder of the Green500, said in a statement that “energy efficiency and performance can co-exist…the last two supercomputers to top the TOP500 are now No. 43 and No. 499 on the Green500.”

“The Roadrunner supercomputer is akin to having the fastest Formula One race car in the world but with the fuel efficiency of a Toyota Prius,” Feng said in the statement.

Nearly one in every three supercomputers on the latest Green500 List now achieves more than 100 megaflops/watt,  whereas in the previous edition of the Green500 from February, only one in every seven supercomputers did.

Also, three supercomputers surpassed the 400 megaflops/watt milestone for the first time. All three machines are based on IBM’s BladeCenter QS22 chassis with the Cell processor.