Russia’s 10th Top 50 Supercomputers Rating Announced

The Research Computing Center of Lomonosov Moscow State University and the RAS Joint Supercomputer Center – the creators of Supercomputers.ru web portal - have announced the publication of the 10th edition of the CIS Top 50 most powerful computers rating. For the first time ever the average peak performance of the systems represented in the rating has exceeded 10 TFlop/s.

The 10th anniversary edition of the Top 50 rating was officially announced on the 31st of March at the International Science Conference 'Parallel Computer Technologies’ in Nizhni Novgorod organized with the assistance of the Russian Fundamental Research Foundation. The recent edition of the rating is available at Supercomputers.ru.

The 10th edition of the rating has demonstrated further performance growth of the supercomputer systems in the CIS. Since the latest publication the total peak performance of such systems has grown by 14.95% and reached 510 TFlop/s (trillions floating-point operations per second). The total performance tested by Linpack has also grown by 15.33% and reached 382.6 TFlop/s within half-year. Thus, the average peak performance has for the first time exceeded 10 TFlop/s and amounts to 7.65 TFlop/s as tested by Linpack.

It should be noted that this year’s total performance growth is one of the lowest throughout history of the Top 50 rating. However, this rate showed its lowest value in the 5th edition, when the peak performance growth amounted to 2.2%. But on the average, performance was growing by 30-80% a year, and in the 8th edition a record performance growth of over 200% was achieved.

The 10th Top 50 rating has been updated by 28%: 14 new (or upgraded) systems have been added. The amount of teraflops computers (with real performance rate more than 1 TFlop/s) in the CIS has grown from 38 to 47 within the last half-year, and the ten systems with the highest performance in the rating have shown the performance growth from 10.3 to 12.36 TFlop/s. In order to get in the Top-50 list, computers must have a performance of no less than 924.4 GFlop/s as tested by Linpack (737.7 GFlop/s in the previous edition) or 1.49 TFlop/s of peak performance (1.15 TFlop/s in the previous edition).

The supercomputer MVS-100K developed by Hewlett-Packard has maintained the leading position in the rating of Supercomputers.ru. The system is installed in the RAS Joint Supercomputer Center. The performance of the updated system amounts to 71.28 TFlop/s as tested by Linpack and 75% of the peak performance (95.04 TFlop/s).

The supercomputer SKIF MSU 'Chebyshev’ has ranked second. The supercomputer was jointly developed by the Lomonosov MSU, the company 'T-Platforms’ and the RAS Institute of Programming Systems. It is located in the MSU Research Computer Center. The real performance of the SKIF MSU 'Chebyshev’ amounts to 47.3 TFlop/s as tested by Linpack which is 78.9% of the peak performance (60 TFlop/s).

In the recent edition, the only change among the top five supercomputers is the performance growth of the supercomputer MVS-100K, which resulted in the increase of the total peak performance of the top five systems by 9.21% to 236.8 TFlop/s.

The new supercomputer developed by Hewlett-Packard and Croc company has been ranked sixth. It is located in the Rostov Regional Center of New Information Technologies of Taganrog Institute of Technology, Southern Federal University. Its performance amounts to 14.5 TFlop/s as tested by Linpack.

The supercomputer HPC HP Enigma X000 developed by Hewlett-Packard has been ranked seventh, with its performance having increased from 8.16 to 13.96 TFlop/s. It is located in the Vyatka State University  Interdisciplinary Aerobiology, Microbiology and Nanotechnology Competence Center of the Higher Educational Institution of Higher Professional Training .

The amount of systems based on Intel chipsets in the 10th edition has decreased insignificantly, from 40 to 37, although they are still dominating. The rating contains 7 systems based on AMD chipsets (compared to 4 in the previous edition), 5 systems based on IBM chipsets (unchanged) and 1 system based on HP chipsets (unchanged). There is a continuous increase in the amount of CPU cores: in this edition it is 128 or higher, with 15 systems having over 1024 cores.

The amount of computers exclusively using the communication network Gigabit Ethernet for interface nodes continues decreasing (from 8 in the previous edition to 7 in the recent edition). The communication technology InfiniBand is now used even more widely (from 33 to 35 systems), whereas the amount of Myrinet-based systems has decreased (from 6 to 5 systems).

The amount of systems used in science and education remained unchanged (30), whereas the amount of systems used in applied research has decreased from 12 to 10. The quantity of systems located in industrial facilities has also slightly decreased (from 6 to 5).

The T-Platforms company holds the leading position by the amount of systems included in the Top 50 rating. The company has showed a slight decrease of its supercomputers from 18 to 17. Hewlett-Packard and IBM stand behind T-Platforms with their 11 and 8 systems (unchanged) respectively.

The next 11th Top 50 CIS Supercomputers edition will be announced by the owners of Supercomputers.ru at the end of September, 2009 at the Russian National Supercomputer Conference ‘Scientific Service in the Internet: Scalability, Parallelism, Efficiency’.

Supercomputers.ru is a joint project of Lomonosov MSU Research Computing Center and the RAS Joint Supercomputer Center. The Top 50 most powerful supercomputers rating has been published on this portal since May, 2004. The rating includes 50 most powerful (as tested by Linpack) supercomputers installed in the CIS. It doesn’t include experimental and temporary systems and is updated twice a year. To avoid intentional system data overvaluation, Supercomputers.ru employees check the real supercomputers parameters on a sample basis. E-mail: top50@supercomputers.ru