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In a report that that ranks the world's most powerful computers, IDC, in conjunction with experts in government, industry and academia, say that Compaq's 3,024-processor Terascale computer at the Pittsburgh Computing Center is the world's most powerful supercomputer. Until now, IBM's ASCI White at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, has generally been regarded as the top computer in the last three Top 500 rankings, a list put out by the supercomputer community.
The Top 500 is a list in the high-performance computing (HPC) world, and is compiled by supercomputer experts in Germany and the U.S., as well as HPC user. But IDC is critical of that list claiming that the measurements it uses to rank machines focuses on peak-level performance without considering other factors that are important to real-world applications. "The excessive focus on peak performance has contributed to a tendency for high-performance computing vendors to develop new generations of supercomputers showing impressive gains in peak performance while lagging behind in many critical system features," IDC analyst Debra Goldfarb said in a statement.
In fact Erich Strohmaier, an author of the Top500 rankings, said that Linpack, a test that the Top 500 rankings is dependant on, "is a pure CPU (processor) benchmark and was not designed to measure other system attributes that may contribute significantly to real-world performance, including internal memory speed, disks, and external networks." The new IDC Balanced Rating includes Linpack and supplements it with additional tests of processor performance, memory system performance and scaling performance.
While understanding the standards behind the tests may be difficult, understanding the results is easy. In IDC's new report, it ranks the top computers in the world by breaking the machines into 149 systems and then determining just how many systems the most powerful computers have. In the capability class Cray scored 58 out of 149, followed by IBM and SGI which scored 24 each.
In the enterprise class, which includes less-powerful supercomputers priced from USD1 million and where the top score was 95, Cray again topped the list with 43, followed by Compaq and HP which had 14 and 13 respectively.
"The tougher the tests, the better we believe Cray systems will do," said Cray's president and chief executive officer Michael P. Haydock.
If you have never heard of Cray, don't worry. The fact is, unlike IBM, Compaq and HP, Cray does not make too many commercials nor does it make many consumer products. None of that matters much to Cray because the people in the US government and major research institutions certainly know a lot about the company and its products. The US National Security Agency, the division in the US government in charge of counter espionage, is putting USD50 million into Cray's line of SV-2 supercomputers in the name of US security interests.
In fact, the supercomputer industry is expected to experience a bit of a boom in the coming years as governments around the world look to beef up their military hardware in the wake of 11 September.
No one should pity IBM though. The long time leader in Supercomputers just won a contract to provide one of the world's most powerful supercomputers for predicting climate changes. The new computer, code-named "Blue Sky," will process nearly 7 trillion calculations per second and will cost USD24 million. It will be used at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and is thought to be nearly 60 percent as powerful as ASCII White, IBM's top supercomputer.
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