[ILUG] Ireland's biggest computer ?

[Mark Fallon]

Niall O Broin wrote:
> 
> Anyone have any idea what that is - I mean most MIPS/FLOPS/other commonly
> accepted measure ? And how big a Beowulf would be needed to beat whatever
> that may be ? No practical application of any sort in mind, just thought
> that it might be an interesting headline :-)
> 
> BTW the whole idea was inspired by the University of Utrecht, in case anyone
> was curious. See http://www.lustrumcluster.uu.nl/uk/index.shtml for details.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Niall
> 

I would suggest reading some of the articles on comp.sys.super

Theoretical Peak Performance is a very poor measure of computing
power especially when it comes to loosely coupled clusters.

For example looking at the top 500 supercomputers

No. 1: Peak = 12,288 GFlops while in tests it gets 4,938 GFlops
No. 7: Peak = 1,344 GFlops while in tests it get 1,035 GFlops

Okay some of this is the number of processors, the inter-connect
and the problem in question, so the application is VERY
important or you could go for the person with the most
boxes wins. Beowulf clusters are useful for a particular
type of problem but they have problems scaling.

Regards,

Mark


_______________________________________________________________

Mark Fallon			E-mail : Mark.Fallon at oracle.com
Senior Software Engineer	Phone  : +353-1-8033207
Global Product Engineering	Fax    : +353-1-8033221
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