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Top500 and Green500 lists

Paulo Ricardo Paz Vital, 2007-11-22

Ok, everyone has heard about the Top500 list, a twice year list of the sites operating the 500 most powerful supercomputers systems of the world. The first list is commonly announced during the International SuperComputing Conference - ISC (June), and the second during the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis - SC (November).

The first position of the last list (released on November 12th, 2007) is the BlueGene/L System, a joint development of IBM and the Department of Energy's (DOE) National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) that was installed at DOE's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif. The No. 2 is from IBM too, a BlueGene/P system installed in Germany at the Forschungszentrum Juelich (FZJ). From the Top10, there are four IBM's systems, and 46.6% of the 500 systems are IBM.

And about the Green500 list, who's know it? The Green500 provides a ranking of the most energy-efficient supercomputers in the world and serve as a complementary view to the Top500 list. The first list was announced on November 15th, 2007 at SC07, and we can see the rank here.

But why is it important to IBM? Because the numbers!! From the first until the 27th position, only the No. 6 is not from IBM. The first five systems are Blue Gene/P Solution, and from the No. 7 until the No. 27 they are eServer Blue Gene Solutions.

This is a clear result of the green concern that IBM is involved.

Summary of the 19th SBAC-PAD

Paulo Ricardo Paz Vital, 2007-10-29

Last week I attended the 19th International Symposium on Computer Architecture and High Performance Computing (SBAC-PAD) in Gramado, RS, Brazil. The web page of the event is here.

There were very nice presentations like the "Computational Characteristics of Production Seismic Migration and its Performance on Novel Processor Architectures" by Jairo Panetta (Petróleo Brasileiro SA, Brazil), "Impacts of Multiprocessor Configurations on Workloads in Bioinformatics" by Mauricio Breternitz (Intel Corporation, USA) and the Google Keynote presentation.

This year the event had many parallel Workshops and the most famous of them are the WSCAD (Workshop em Sistemas Computacionais de Alto Desempenho - Workshop in High Performance Computing Systems). This is a portuguese event, so I think that is not interesting point the presentations here, but there was a good CELL programming short course.

Summarizing the event I can point three things discussed in the keynotes and panels, to solve the problem of the new challenges of parallel and multi-core programming:

1. Use high level programming languages;

2. Use tools developed to do the work of parallelling the code;

3. Raise the level of abstraction of the problem.

These three points of view are defended by Kunle Olukotun (Stanford University), Mauricio Bareternitz (Intel) and Laxmikant (Sanjay) Kale (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), respectively.

developerWorks' article

Paulo Ricardo Paz Vital, 2007-09-28

I'm glad to anounce that my article about how to install Linux in POWERmachines using the IBM Installation Toolkit for Linux on POWER was published in IBM DeveloperWorks website. It was published in the "Linux", "Power Architecture technology" and "IBM Systems" brands of the website.

This article is based in the last IBM Installation Toolkit version (2.1) that was released in Sept/25/2007.

I hope you like the reading and please, feel free to write commentsabout the article