I work in an HPC facility. We are all a bit skeptical of LINPACK running on a hybrid system. LINPACK in general is an interesting benchmark. We recently boug

I work in an HPC facility. We are all a bit skeptical of LINPACK running on a hybrid system. LINPACK in general is an interesting benchmark. We recently bought a new cluster. We were faced with an interesting decision. Get 4,000 cores with Infiniband, giving us a spot on the top500 list (We've been on there for the past 5 years) or get a 6,000 cores with gigabit ethernet, losing our spot on the top500. (We get %90 of our theoretical max over infiniband. Gigabit drops that down to 50%). We did a survey among our users and very few of them ran multinode jobs. Most used 8 or 12 threads, which runs fine on a dual socket hex core westmere. So we dropped infiniband. So even though we technically have a slower cluster than we could have had, we have more efficient utilization and are able to offer our users more resources. Since very few comercial applications can currently take advantage of a hybrid system, it seems to me this cluster was built with the top500 in mind, rather than being efficiently used. As far as useful results, I wouldn't be surprised if it only accomplished 2 or 3 times what we do, and we're a 10,000 core shop that probably won't be on the next top500.