Macs On The Top 500 List

Posted by: Arik Hesseldahl on November 14, 2006

The latest list of the Top 500 supercomputing sites in the world is out today. This is a regularly updated list put out by The University of Mannheim, The University of Tennessee and the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center. It charts the 500 most powerful known supercomputers around the world. Topping the list — making it the fastest known computer in the world — is BlueGene/L, an IBM system in place the U.S. Government’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif. It can deliver a sustained 280.6 TeraFLOPS of performance. FLOPS refers to floating point operations per second, and one teraFLOP, and if I understand it right, I think that means it can do 280.6 trillion of these operations every second. That’s some serious processing power, and it requires 65,536 dual-processor compute nodes to get the job done.

I spotted two Apple-based systems on the list, and both are in the Top 50. The first came in at number 28, and it’s called MACH5. Comprising a batch of Apple XServes using 3,072 of the old IBM PowerPC G5 processors, and reaches a performance of 16.18 teraFLOPS. It’s owned and operated by The Colsa Corporation, a privately held defense contractor based in Huntsville, Alabama.

The other Mac on the list is at the Terascale Computing FacilityVirginia Tech, using 1,100 dual-processor PowerPC-based XServes for a combined performance of 12.25 teraFLOPS. This is the facility that got so much attention a few years back for being the third fastest supercomputer in the world, when it was really huge room full of interconnected PowerMac G5s. When they upgraded to XServes, it still managed to come in as the seventh fastest. BusinessWeek covered Virgina Tech’s installation here.

I have to wonder what Apple’s shift to the Intel architecture will do to its chances of being used in major supercomputing projects again. Of the systems on the list, 261 systems or more than 52 percent use Intel processors, and that is down from 333 or two-thirds of the systems a year ago. Sure, Apple loves promoting the Mac for use in serious science applications, and OS X can certainly hold its own as a platform for science applications.

Meanwhile, AMD’s Opteron chips are the second most popular on the list, with 113, or nearly 23 percent of the systems, up from 55 systems or 11 percent a year ago. IBM Power Processors, which would include the self-assembled Apple systems, were used in 93 systems or 18.6%, up from 73 systems of 14.6% a year ago.

I’ll be interested to see when the first Intel-based Apple system makes the Top500 list, because its bound to happen eventually.

TrackBack URL for this entry: http://blogs.businessweek.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/