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China's increase of 42 systems on Top500 is largely attributable to a single company. Chinese "internet company A" (as labelled by Top500 https://www.top500.org
by fspeech 9y ago
China's increase of 42 systems on Top500 is largely attributable to a single company. Chinese "internet company A" (as labelled by Top500 https://www.top500.org/site/50596 https://www.top500.org/site/50596) is presumably Alibaba, judging from its residence city of Hangzhou. It alone counts for 35 new machines on the list since June! (Click on the history tab to see the number for yourself.) I wonder if they are part of Alibaba's cloud services or for internal uses. Either way presumably Alibaba sees commercial value in owning them.
- fspeech 9y agoOn closer inspection I have to say that I am a bit confused by these rankings. It appears that Inspur (a Chinese HPC company listed as the vendor for Alibaba's systems) lists its product as rack scale servers. By that standard what is to keep any data center operator from claiming a top spot on the list? Is it because Inspur systems can be configured to run Linpack benchmark as clusters? Alibaba's published use case http://www.inspursystems.com/case-studies/alibaba/ http://www.inspursystems.com/case-studies/alibaba/ does not seem particularly floating point intensive, so the distinction seems somewhat artificial.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- gresrun 9y agoIt’s also rather misleading since the majority of computing resources in the US are in “cloud” data centers (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, etc.) and they never bother to take the time to run Linpack on their clusters because making $$ is more important. I would wager Google’s compute cells alone would constitute a few dozen slots in the top 100.
- danmaz74 9y agoYes, it would be interesting to learn what are they used for.