6 ms·

Top 500 supercomputers by processor family

57 points by mceachen 7y ago

voldacar 7y ago
I wonder if the x86 dominance has declined slightly since 2015 - I know the #1 supercomputer is currently a POWER machine, and there have been some Chinese supercomputers that use their own manycore cpus with what I think is a MIPS-inspired ISA
- einpoklum 7y ago
  It has begun to, in favor of AMD64 - with the Epyc processors which appeared in mid-2017: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epyc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epyc they've been generally competitive (probably much more so when you factor price in). Now, with Rome having come out, their market share is supposedly increasing quite rapidly, since apparently it trounces Intel's Xeon offerings.
  - delish 7y ago
    GP said "x86 dominance" not Intel x86 dominance, for what it's worth. AMD64 is x86-64.
- jart 7y ago
  It hasn't declined any more than pepsi and coca cola have declined, and there's no reason to believe it ever will. MIPS is gone. Power architecture being open sourced likely means IBM no longer has a business interest in it. This is what business folks call shakeout. It's what intellectuals would call the "end of history" for the microprocessor, similar to the fall the USSR. Big money research has moved on to quantum processors. Speaking as someone who's an avid reader of open source codebases, I kind of wish more of my colleagues would accept this, because it really stymies progress in open source that folks continue supporting huge amounts of code that today are mostly only used by folks doing things like emulating Sega Saturn on an FPGA for fun.
AWildC182 7y ago
Can I just point out how much I hate those sand charts? You can only tell what the bottom most variable is doing. How big is the AMD segment when intel was rapidly rising? You can't tell because slope hides line width. Want to know the trajectory of the other small players? Too bad. Don't use sand charts kids.
- mruts 7y ago
  Yeah I can here to say this. It's almost impossible to actually figure out what's going on
- nessus42 7y ago
  > Don't use sand charts kids. And what would you use as an alternative? It would take a LOT of bars to display this information during the 90s as a grouped bar chart.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - marcosdumay 7y ago
    > And what would you use as an alternative? Non-cumulative line charts. As usually is the answer to that question. As a bonus, you can break line charts by line, and you can zoom parts of it.
    - nessus42 7y ago
      > Non-cumulative line charts. I suppose. But a chart with 23 different lines is quite difficult to read in my experience. I.e., visually distinguishing that many lines from each other is not easy.
      - marcosdumay 7y ago
        A chart with 23 different series is hard to read in any format. That's why being able to break it down by line is good.
3JPLW 7y ago
This is missing a big portion of the picture: GPUs and other heterogeneously attached accelerators.
- markandrewj 7y ago
  For more detailed information visit https://www.top500.org/ https://www.top500.org/ instead of the wikipedia article.
- dagw 7y ago
  Here you go: https://www.top500.org/statistics/list/ https://www.top500.org/statistics/list/ tldr: Nvidia V100 and P100 dominate when you look at the number of systems, while the NVIDIA Volta GV100 dominates the performance chart.
einpoklum 7y ago
Note that statistics tend to be different if you focus on the top 10 or top 5 systems (not represented in the linked chart).
erichurkman 7y ago
Any Wikipedia engineers here? Being linked, on desktop, to this file represents an exercise in futility. I want to read the full article we were linked to. My click targets, in order: 'x' - 'x' closes things. Can I close this modal to see the full page? No, it closes and redirects back to this page on HN. 'more details'? No, it brings me to a details page about the graph image. Cool, it's used on some other pages. Useless as a reader. 'black space' around the image? Not a clickable target, why would I click there? Can I zoom in? No, the image auto-resizes but the image viewer chrome zooms in — making the image smaller?? Am I just a bad Wikipedia user?
- rm999 7y ago
  Agreed, I went through a similar flow. Direct link to the image: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ef/Processor_families_in_TOP500_supercomputers.svg/2560px-Processor_families_in_TOP500_supercomputers.svg.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ef/Pr... Article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOP500 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOP500
  - bscphil 7y ago
    The linked article was actually https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercomputer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercomputer
- twic 7y ago
  For me, the X closed the lightbox and left me looking at the 'Supercomputer' article. This is in desktop Firefox.
mproud 7y ago
Do you think ARM will ever make it in this list?
- josemanuel 7y ago
  Fugaku should do it.
- dagw 7y ago
  Given that the future of at least a subset of HPC is spreading out super parallel calculation to lots of GPUs via fast interconnects, it is certainly conceivable that ARM based systems can do that as well as x86 system.
tomc1985 7y ago
That color scheme makes my eyes bleed. Whoever thought black-on-dark-blue was a good choice? I'm viewing this on a 99% sRGB screen and none of the dark blue boxes in the key are discernable
- bscphil 7y ago
  Anecdata, but I have a calibrated screen with about 95% AdobeRGB coverage, and the dark boxes and lines are very clearly distinguishable. Is your screen calibrated? Is something off with your contrast setting? Maybe a very bright backlight ruins the contrast ratio at the darker end? (I agree, however, that it's not a very attractive color scheme, and not a terribly informative graph anyway. A simple X-Y plot would be better.)
  - tomc1985 7y ago
    These screens are factory calibrated (supposedly, but they included a colorimeter report in the box) and they're all consistent several years later so I'm guessing so. Maybe its gamma? Or maybe you're on OSX? (IIRC apple devices use gamma 2.2 by default and Windows does 1.8? I think?) Our difference could totally be because of default gamma.
    - bscphil 7y ago
      I'm on Linux, and my gamma is calibrated to 2.2. 1.8 sounds way too low, I think! sRGB is roughly a 2.2 gamma curve, and a lot of professional media is done for screens expected to have a gamma of 2.4.

57 points by mceachen 7y ago

I wonder if the x86 dominance has declined slightly since 2015 - I know the #1 supercomputer is currently a POWER machine, and there have been some Chinese supercomputers that use their own manycore cpus with what I think is a MIPS-inspired ISA

einpoklum 7y ago
It has begun to, in favor of AMD64 - with the Epyc processors which appeared in mid-2017: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epyc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epyc they've been generally competitive (probably much more so when you factor price in). Now, with Rome having come out, their market share is supposedly increasing quite rapidly, since apparently it trounces Intel's Xeon offerings.
- delish 7y ago
  GP said "x86 dominance" not Intel x86 dominance, for what it's worth. AMD64 is x86-64.
jart 7y ago
It hasn't declined any more than pepsi and coca cola have declined, and there's no reason to believe it ever will. MIPS is gone. Power architecture being open sourced likely means IBM no longer has a business interest in it. This is what business folks call shakeout. It's what intellectuals would call the "end of history" for the microprocessor, similar to the fall the USSR. Big money research has moved on to quantum processors. Speaking as someone who's an avid reader of open source codebases, I kind of wish more of my colleagues would accept this, because it really stymies progress in open source that folks continue supporting huge amounts of code that today are mostly only used by folks doing things like emulating Sega Saturn on an FPGA for fun.

AWildC182 7y ago

Can I just point out how much I hate those sand charts? You can only tell what the bottom most variable is doing. How big is the AMD segment when intel was rapidly rising? You can't tell because slope hides line width. Want to know the trajectory of the other small players? Too bad. Don't use sand charts kids.

mruts 7y ago
Yeah I can here to say this. It's almost impossible to actually figure out what's going on
nessus42 7y ago
> Don't use sand charts kids. And what would you use as an alternative? It would take a LOT of bars to display this information during the 90s as a grouped bar chart.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- marcosdumay 7y ago
  > And what would you use as an alternative? Non-cumulative line charts. As usually is the answer to that question. As a bonus, you can break line charts by line, and you can zoom parts of it.
  - nessus42 7y ago
    > Non-cumulative line charts. I suppose. But a chart with 23 different lines is quite difficult to read in my experience. I.e., visually distinguishing that many lines from each other is not easy.
    - marcosdumay 7y ago
      A chart with 23 different series is hard to read in any format. That's why being able to break it down by line is good.

3JPLW 7y ago

This is missing a big portion of the picture: GPUs and other heterogeneously attached accelerators.

markandrewj 7y ago
For more detailed information visit https://www.top500.org/ https://www.top500.org/ instead of the wikipedia article.
dagw 7y ago
Here you go: https://www.top500.org/statistics/list/ https://www.top500.org/statistics/list/ tldr: Nvidia V100 and P100 dominate when you look at the number of systems, while the NVIDIA Volta GV100 dominates the performance chart.

einpoklum 7y ago

Note that statistics tend to be different if you focus on the top 10 or top 5 systems (not represented in the linked chart).

erichurkman 7y ago

Any Wikipedia engineers here? Being linked, on desktop, to this file represents an exercise in futility. I want to read the full article we were linked to. My click targets, in order: 'x' - 'x' closes things. Can I close this modal to see the full page? No, it closes and redirects back to this page on HN. 'more details'? No, it brings me to a details page about the graph image. Cool, it's used on some other pages. Useless as a reader. 'black space' around the image? Not a clickable target, why would I click there? Can I zoom in? No, the image auto-resizes but the image viewer chrome zooms in — making the image smaller?? Am I just a bad Wikipedia user?

rm999 7y ago
Agreed, I went through a similar flow. Direct link to the image: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ef/Processor_families_in_TOP500_supercomputers.svg/2560px-Processor_families_in_TOP500_supercomputers.svg.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ef/Pr... Article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOP500 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOP500
- bscphil 7y ago
  The linked article was actually https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercomputer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercomputer
twic 7y ago
For me, the X closed the lightbox and left me looking at the 'Supercomputer' article. This is in desktop Firefox.

mproud 7y ago

Do you think ARM will ever make it in this list?

josemanuel 7y ago
Fugaku should do it.
dagw 7y ago
Given that the future of at least a subset of HPC is spreading out super parallel calculation to lots of GPUs via fast interconnects, it is certainly conceivable that ARM based systems can do that as well as x86 system.

tomc1985 7y ago

That color scheme makes my eyes bleed. Whoever thought black-on-dark-blue was a good choice? I'm viewing this on a 99% sRGB screen and none of the dark blue boxes in the key are discernable

bscphil 7y ago
Anecdata, but I have a calibrated screen with about 95% AdobeRGB coverage, and the dark boxes and lines are very clearly distinguishable. Is your screen calibrated? Is something off with your contrast setting? Maybe a very bright backlight ruins the contrast ratio at the darker end? (I agree, however, that it's not a very attractive color scheme, and not a terribly informative graph anyway. A simple X-Y plot would be better.)
- tomc1985 7y ago
  These screens are factory calibrated (supposedly, but they included a colorimeter report in the box) and they're all consistent several years later so I'm guessing so. Maybe its gamma? Or maybe you're on OSX? (IIRC apple devices use gamma 2.2 by default and Windows does 1.8? I think?) Our difference could totally be because of default gamma.
  - bscphil 7y ago
    I'm on Linux, and my gamma is calibrated to 2.2. 1.8 sounds way too low, I think! sRGB is roughly a 2.2 gamma curve, and a lot of professional media is done for screens expected to have a gamma of 2.4.