China's supercomputing whizzkids: Busting out a 8.224 teraflops cluster? Guilty as charged
LINPACK win wasn't a record – but commodity iron a bargain at $4.99 per GFLOP
By
Dan Olds, Gabriel Consulting
12th December 2013
China’s National University of Defense Technology (
NUDT) grabbed the LINPACK award at the recently concluded SC13 Student Cluster Competition. NUDT topped all other competitors with a score of 8.224 TFLOP/s.
NUDT’s LINPACK win isn’t a surprise to competition observers, the team hails from the home of Tianhe-1 and Tianhe-2, meaning they know their way around their GPU-heavy cluster. They also have a bit of a reputation as LINPACK specialists, having won this award in previous competitions.
Team Germany, FAU (Friedrich-Alexander University) grabbed second place with a score of 7.413 TFLOP/s. The Germans (or Team Kraut, as they dubbed themselves) had an equal number of Kepler GPUs as NUDT (8 total), but had only half the memory, at 512GB, as the victorious Chinese.
The reconstituted all-female Team Venus 2.0 nailed down a third place finish in LINPACK with a score of 7.225 TFLOP/s. This is a vast increase (more than 3x) vs. their score and middle of the pack finish at SC12 last year. Nice work, that.
No New LINPACK Record at SC13
For the first time since 2009, we didn’t see a new student LINPACK record set during the competition. In fact, we took a couple of baby steps backwards.
The winning NUDT SC13 score of 8.224 TF would have netted them a third place finish at June’s ISC’13 cluster challenge, behind
Huazhong U’s 8.455 TFLOP/s and the 8.321 TF/s turned in by Edinburgh University.
The major reason why we didn’t see a new LINPACK high water mark are mostly due to teams using the same accelerators (GPUs in this case) as they used in the ISC’13 competition several months back. GPUs have been the main driver behind the explosive increase in cluster competition LINPACK scores since 2010.
China's supercomputing whizzkids: Busting out a 8.224 teraflops cluster? Guilty as charged • The Register