The November 2012 edition of the TOP500 list of supercomputers includes seven new entries from oil and ‘energy’ companies. While Petrobras and Saudi Aramco are brave enough to name their submissions, the others curiously prefer to remain anonymous.
All of the new energy entries run Linux. Four on the 2012 entries come from Hewlett Packard’s SL230/250 ‘Gen 8’ cluster range. Petrobras’ Xeon/Nvidia-based machine was build by Brazilian Itautec. Saudi Aramco’s supercomputer is a Dell PowerEdge M610 cluster. A ‘UK-based’ oil company deploys an x3650M4 cluster from IBM.
One of the ‘anonymous’ HP supplied machines comes in at a respectable Number 48 with a 458 terabyte bandwidth. This compares with a reported 17 petaflop performance from the current leader— the US DOE/SC/Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Cray XK7. Like the Petrobras machine, the Oak Ridge Cray leverages Nvidia hardware acceleration. The HP and IBM energy clusters appear to manage without GPU accelerators.
As usual, a caveat is in order. Not all HPC installations bother to report to the List and some may be there masquerading as ‘Geoscience’ machines which we have not tallied. Maybe some of the ‘Energy’ companies are actually designing wind farms! More from top500.org.
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