Supercomputers: interconnected servers running Linux

The list of the top-500 Supercomputers was released today at top500.org.

The list shows a number of interesting statistics. I am including some comments for changes observed from 2000 to 2007.

• Operating Systems. The stats show a significant change in 7-years. Unix went from 90-to-12 percent while Linux went from 5.60-to-77.80 percent.
  
• Processor Family. A significant change is apparent also where RISC-based technologies, namely IBM's Power, Sun's SPARC, MIPS, Alpha and PA-RISC, lost to the combination of Intel and AMD processor technology. The combined Intel and AMD offerings went from 4.00-to-78.80 percent.

These changes indicate that in contrast to earlier vector-based technologies, 80% of today's top-500 supercomputers are configured as thousands of garden-variety, conventional Intel and AMD microprocessors, e.g. scalar computers, running Linux and interconnected, clustered, by several network technologies.

The use of thousands of clustered Intel and AMD based servers for supercomputers may explain why tier-one vendors continue to devote much R&D and marketing to this segment. It may be regarded as a niche but apparently today it represents 19% of the server market and growing at 9% per year.

The industry seems to have found that there is much in common between the technology components needed for supercomputers and those needed by Google, Amazon, Yahoo, YouTube, Microsoft and others to power the growth in network-based services.

A key component that often calls less attention than real estate, power, storage, servers, OS and application software is the technology used to interconnect, to cluster, servers.

Core and leaf Switches and accompanying cables represent a huge expense, room, weight and computing capacity limiting factor.

Sun announced Constellation a system offering the building blocks around a connectivity technology that promises to simplify configuring supercomputers, should I say web services, scaling from tera-to-peta-flops.

The heart of Sun's Constellation is Magnum, a High-density 3456-port InfiniBand switch, that contributes to simplify the configuration and logistics for interconnecting large numbers of servers.

+------------- Top-500 Supercomputers ----------+
+------------- Number of Processors ------------+
    Date       Processors       Count     Share %
    
    2007.June  1                    1      0.20 % 
               33-64                3      0.60 %  
               65-128               5      1.00 %  
               129-256              2      0.40 %  
               257-512             81     16.20 %     
               513-1024           126     25.20 %     
               1025-2048          176     35.20 %     
               2049-4096           53     10.60 %     
               4k-8k               33      6.60 %  
               8k-16k              14      2.80 %  
               16k-32k              3      0.60 %  
               32k-64k              2      0.40 %  
               64k-128k             1      0.20 %
 
+------------- Interconnection Technology ------+
    Date       Technology      Count      Share %
    
    2007.June  Gigabit Ethernet  206      41.20 %
               Infiniband        128      25.60 %
               Myrinet            46       9.20 %
               SP Switch          36       7.20 %
               Proprietary        35       7.00 %
               NUMAlink           15       3.00 %
               Quadrics           11       2.20 %
               Crossbar           10       2.00 %
               Cray Interconnect   9       1.80 %   
               Mixed               4       0.80 %
 
+------------- Operating Systems ---------------+
    Date       OS               Count     Share %
    
    2007.June  Linux              389     77.80 %
               Unix                60     12.00 %
               Mixed               42      8.40 %
               BSD Based            4      0.80 %
               Mac OS               3      0.60 %
               Windows              2      0.40 %
 
    2000.June  Unix               453     90.60 %
               Linux               28      5.60 %
               BSD Based           17      3.40 %
               N/A                  2      0.40 %
  
+------------- Processor Family ----------------+
    Date       Processor        Count     Share %
    
    2007.June  Intel EM64T        231     46.20 %
               AMD x86_64         107     21.40 %
               Power               85     17.00 %
               Intel IA-32         28      5.60 %
               Intel IA-64         28      5.60 %
               PA-RISC             10      2.00 %
               NEC                  4      0.80 %
               Sparc                3      0.60 %
               Alpha                2      0.40 %
               Cray                 2      0.40 %
               Intel + AMD        394     78.80 %
 
    2000.June  Power              143     28.60 %
               Sparc              122     24.40 %
               MIPS                62     12.40 %
               Alpha               56     11.20 %
               PA-RISC             53     10.60 %
               NEC                 25      5.00 %
               Fujitsu             19      3.80 %
               Hitachi SR8000      10      2.00 %
               Cray                 6      1.20 %
               Intel IA-32          3      0.60 %
               Intel i860           1      0.20 %
+-----------------------------------------------+