[Beowulf] Register article on Opteron - disagree

[Craig Tierney]

On Mon, 2004-11-22 at 06:23, Patrick Geoffray wrote:
> Hi Jeff,
> 
> Jeff Layton wrote:
> > Did anyone else notice that once the Columbia numbers were publically
> > announced and within a day or two of the Top500 announcement,
> > BlueGene/L suddenly appeared on the list at the top? I thought there was
> > some kind of deadline, but evidently, if you are a sponsor of the Top500
> > site, then deadlines mean little.
> 
> As a matter of fact, the BluGene number was ready way before the 
> Columbia number. And as all of the major players are sponsor of the 
> Top500 site, your assumption that it can buy you an advantage is not 
> quite logical.
> 
> The ultimate deadline for everybody was set for October 25th. As soon as 
> they got their number, SGI/Intel turned on the PR machine and flooded 
> the headlines, vigorously claiming being #1. Of course without knowing 
> for sure. The IBM strategy was to stay quiet up to the official release 
> of the list, and I guess disgrace SGI/Intel at the last minute. 
> Unfortunately, the BluGene number was leaked and published before the 
> official release.

Sorry if this is a repeat but there have been alot of emails
and I haven't combed all of them.

It isn't that the number for BlueGene was leaked more than
that all numbers have been always available before the list
is published bi-annually.

See http://www.netlib.org/benchmark/performance.ps

This file has always been updated as the numbers become
available.  Sometimes there are duplicates depending on
the configuration of the systems, but the numbers are there.
I check the list before SC2002 for an entry I submitted for
a large Xeon cluster. I saw the BlueGene number there before 
SC2004.  It was pulled about a week before-hand.  This chart
also had the 51.7 Tflops number for Columbia even though the
announced number was still 40+ Tflops.

Craig