22 Years Of Supercomputer Evolution (Archive)

[IInuyasha74]

In 1993, the TOP500 began to publish a list of the world's most powerful supercomputers. With these records we look at how supercomputers have evolved over the last 22 years.

22 Years Of Supercomputer Evolution : Read more

 

[George Phillips]

A mid range desktop PC today can generate about 60Gflops like CM-5 in 1993. This is just incredible. This doesn't even consider the fact that the sub-memory systems on modern desktop systems also should be much faster than CM-5.

 

[stairmand]

The current Fury X GPU is over 8600 Gflops! That makes a home GPU over 140 times faster that the CM-5.

 

[Pikker]

A high-end dual or even single-socket system with four GPUs should have about the same amount of teraflops as the 2002 Earth Simulator, but with far lower latency, since you don't have thousands of components spread out over hundreds of square meters.

Amazing how you can have a supercomputer from just 13 years ago on your desktop today.

 

[firefoxx04]

wow.. I was benching my 4690k the other day with IBT and I was seeing 100-110Gflops (something in that range)

The impressive part is the entire system uses less than 150W during IBT and less than 110W when running x264 stress test along with just under 30W during idle.

 

[Robert Cook]

China cannot win this race... Especially with US technology...
What I wonder, is how powerful the computers are that the government keeps secret. Back in the cold war, the Government kept quite a few then powerful computers secret.
It would not surprise me to find out that both china and the US either can run their computers at higher speeds, or have other computers of greater power.
After all, the government does not care about its benchmark scores and how they stack up against others, or at least they should not.
It will be interesting to find out what Obama's proposed super computer will be like.

 

[Cryio]

I think Intel may do real damage to Nvidia and AMD if they'll someday release a Xeon Phi GPU as a consumer card.

 

[Guillermo_1]

On these machines you can play teris ??

 

[Brian_R170]

China cannot win this race... Especially with US technology...

It appears the US government agrees with you since AMD, IBM, Intel, and NVidia were banned from exporting CPU/GPU products to China for use in supercomputers earlier this year. Of course, since they are off-the-shelf products, the Chinese government can still purchase the products they want from thousands of sources, or in the case of IBM OpenPower, the Chinese can just manufacture their own.

 

[clonazepam]

China cannot win this race... Especially with US technology...
What I wonder, is how powerful the computers are that the government keeps secret. Back in the cold war, the Government kept quite a few then powerful computers secret.
It would not surprise me to find out that both china and the US either can run their computers at higher speeds, or have other computers of greater power.
After all, the government does not care about its benchmark scores and how they stack up against others, or at least they should not.
It will be interesting to find out what Obama's proposed super computer will be like.

I'm with you on that. If Intel is allowed to sell that type of hardware to China, then just imagine what they might have hidden away in government contracts.

If you really want a fancy tinfoil hat, how about the possibility of computer generated online communities? Below a certain IQ number, a person, or group of persons may never even tell the difference. This would be even simpler to achieve if a character limit were imposed.

 

[Brian_R170]

I think Intel may do real damage to Nvidia and AMD if they'll someday release a Xeon Phi GPU as a consumer card.

You mean as a consumer graphics card, right? You can buy a Xeon Phi card today if you desire. It's just not a graphics card

Xeon Phi started out as Larabee which was a discreet graphics card project, but it got cancelled. I'm pretty sure that if it was feasible and there were good margins in it, Intel wouldn't have changed directions the way they did.

 

[Dom111]

no SPARC ?

 

[IInuyasha74]

no SPARC ?

There are a lot of SPARC supercomputers, they just haven't held power as the fastest supercomputer in the world.

 

[Aspiring techie]

I wonder what the Cinebench score would be LOL!

 

[IInuyasha74]

I think Intel may do real damage to Nvidia and AMD if they'll someday release a Xeon Phi GPU as a consumer card.

You mean as a consumer graphics card, right? You can buy a Xeon Phi card today if you desire. It's just not a graphics card

Xeon Phi started out as Larabee which was a discreet graphics card project, but it got cancelled. I'm pretty sure that if it was feasible and there were good margins in it, Intel wouldn't have changed directions the way they did.

This is correct. The Larrabee cards being designed could have been used as graphics cards, as they contained TMUs, ROPs, and other essentially GPU hardware, but they were ultimately cancelled. I think that during the testing of Larrabee prototypes that the hardware would be best used for compute performance and shifted the project that way instead. They could have produced both, but the Xeon Phi cards lack TMUs, ROPs, display controllers, etc. because there was no need to have it on a card designed for computational performance.

I suspect if Intel ever attempts to make a graphics card again that it will be more closely related to its current iGPU products, just significantly scaled up. They already have a firm position at the bottom of the graphics market, though, push the performance of their iGPUs higher with each new generation. The Iris Pro products already compete with graphics cards priced under $100, and we haven't even seen what Skylake's Iris Pro chips will be capable of. So it is unlikely they will attempt a dedicated graphics card.

 

[ToineF]

China cannot win this race... Especially with US technology...
What I wonder, is how powerful the computers are that the government keeps secret. Back in the cold war, the Government kept quite a few then powerful computers secret.
It would not surprise me to find out that both china and the US either can run their computers at higher speeds, or have other computers of greater power.
After all, the government does not care about its benchmark scores and how they stack up against others, or at least they should not.
It will be interesting to find out what Obama's proposed super computer will be like.

I'm with you on that. If Intel is allowed to sell that type of hardware to China, then just imagine what they might have hidden away in government contracts.

If you really want a fancy tinfoil hat, how about the possibility of computer generated online communities? Below a certain IQ number, a person, or group of persons may never even tell the difference. This would be even simpler to achieve if a character limit were imposed.

Most factories and brains at intel are in china now..... They make money because of china and if you have ever worked or even heard of anybody having a job in china, you know the govt in deep into it. Intel is probably full of china govt agents monitoring everything.

 

[IInuyasha74]

Most factories and brains at intel are in china now..... They make money because of china and if you have ever worked or even heard of anybody having a job in china, you know the govt in deep into it. Intel is probably full of china govt agents monitoring everything.

Where did you get that from?

http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/architecture-and-technology/global-manufacturing.html

Intel has factories in several places, but there are more in the United States than any other country. Intel also has more offices inside of the United States than anywhere else in the world, and more jobs.

http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/location/usa.html
http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/location/worldwide.html
http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/jobs/locations.html

Everything you said is completely inaccurate.

 

[Eggz]

My iPhone can do 193 PFlops in 2 seconds at 189 fps. Beat that!

 

[TbsToy]

The good ole USA has the knowledge, skills and the experience to stay way out front with everything computers. Just because there are manufacturing plants in other countries doesn't equate to where the knowledge and innovation lives. Notice how computers and the defense industry seem, ( ), to somehow be intertwined. Uh yuuuuh!
Walt Prill

 

[mavikt]

On these machines you can play teris ??

nononono, yes, but can it play Crysis?

Joke aside; A nice round-up for the piece would have been a graph that plotted the theoretical and practical performance + the energy consumption and an efficiency measure (flops/watt).

 

[mavikt]

...over the years gone by!

 

[Brian_R170]

Most factories and brains at intel are in china now...

Most!?!? Intel makes no secrets about where it's factories and employees are located. You may want to look that up before making such claims because you are quite misinformed.

Intel is probably full of china govt agents monitoring everything.

Uh, yeah, "probably" no more than any other tech company, but it's sure hard to argue with such hard evidence.

 

[turkey3_scratch]

I just don't understand how it works. How do all these motherboards link up?

 

[IInuyasha74]

I just don't understand how it works. How do all these motherboards link up?

Numerous methods. The networking and connecting of all the hardware to make these supercomputers fills thick textbooks and is a feat of computer engineering in and of itself. Because of all the factors that need to be considered while building one of these systems, it is difficult to answer that question in concise manner.

 

[utroz]

Oh the joys of the Super Computer races...