[Beowulf] top500 clusters using

Mark Hahn hahn at mcmaster.ca
Wed Feb 3 13:27:00 PST 2010


> Last top500 lists contain a set of sites which are not from HPC world.

sure - it always has.  top500 is not particularly HPC-specific,
since linpack only weakly measures important factors like memory
and interconnect bandwidth and latency.  the main appeal of linpack
is that it's pretty well-understood and uses hardware (FPUs) present
in all conventional machines...

> I understand that there may be parallelized applications which may use whole 
> cluster for one task, but this task isn't floating-point oriented.

I would almost say that linpack is not particularly about FP
(since you can derive integer rates from the scores if you want.)

> etc. IMHO they may use clusters for Web-hosting etc, where may be load 
> balancing is used. I.e. it's not "supercomputer" (I means computer, all 
> CPUs/cores of which may be used for solving of one task).

I think it's more common than you think for clusters to be load-balanced
among many applications - or conversely that single-job clusters,
which might strictly be called "capability", are rare.



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