

The project also uses LINPACK, but with a different metric, gigaflops per watt. The Green 500 is looking for energy efficient supercomputers. When I took a tour of the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility a few years ago, Buddy Bland, who is Project Director, told me he could tell when he comes to the Lab in the morning if they are running the LINPACK benchmark by looking at how much steam is coming out of the cooling towers. I've made this cartoon.Įnergy consumption of big machines is a very important issue. When I gave my talk about "Parallel LINPACK on the Hypercube", some wise guy asked "How many megaflops per gallon are you getting?" It was intended as a joke at the time, but it is really an important question today. So we rented a gas generator, put it in the parking lot, and ran a long cable past the swimming pool into the conference room. The machine required 220 volts, but the hotel conference room we were using didn't have 220. Many years ago we introduced the Intel Hypercube at a small conference on parallel computing in Knoxville. In addition to faster hardware, the speed-up in LINPACK is due to all the algorithmic innovation represented by those terms in the description of HPL. Neither of these comes close to explaining what we've seen with LINPACK.
Linpack benchmark multinode plus#
With a matrix of order $n$, the megaflop rate for a factorization by Gaussian elimination plus two triangular solves is The hand-written notes shown here are Jack Dongarra's calculation of the megaflop rate, millions of floating point operations per second. With the LINPACK naming conventions, DGEFA stands for Double precision GEneral matrix FActor and DGESL stands for Double precision GEneral matrix SoLve.Īppendix B of the LINPACK Users' Guide has the timing results. We also asked them to measure the time required for two subroutines in the package, DGEFA and DGESL, to solve a 100-by-100 system of simultaneous linear equations.

Linpack benchmark multinode software#
During the development we asked two dozen universities and laboratories to test the software on a variety of main frame machines that were then available in central computer centers. The LINPACK benchmark is an accidental offspring of the development of the LINPACK software package in the 1970's. Tianhe-2's top speed of 33.86 petaflops on the latest Top500 list is nearly twice as fast as number two Titan from Oak Ridge at 17.59 petaflops and number three Sequoia from Lawrence Livermore at 17.17 petaflops. The next Supercomputing Conference will be in November in Denver. Last week's conference in Leipzig produced this Top 500 List. They announce their results twice a year at international supercomputing conferences. Since 1993, LINPACK benchmark results have been collected by the Top500 project.

The ranking of world's fastest computer is based on the LINPACK Benchmark. Tianhe-2 has 16,000 nodes, each with two Intel Xeon IvyBridge processors and three Xeon Phi processors, for a combined total of 3,120,000 computing cores. The Tianhe-2, also known as the MilkyWay-2, is being built in Gunagzho, China by China's National University of Defense Technology. An announcement made last week at the International Supercomputing Conference in Leipzig, Germany, declared the Tianhe-2 to be the world's fastest computer.
