The latest edition of the authoritative TOP500 list of global supercomputers was unveiled this month at the 2013 International supercomputing conference in Leipzig. The TOP500 list is headed by Tianhe-2, a home brew machine at China’s national university of defence technology. Tianhe-2 report 34 petaflops on the Linpack benchmark from 16,000 nodes each with two Intel IvyBridge controllers and three Xenon Phi (previously the Intel MIC) ‘supercomputer computer on a chip’ parallel processing units—a total of over three million cores.
Total’s Pangea supercomputer, a Xeon E5-based SGI ICE with a mere 110,000 cores (Oil IT J February 2012) comes in at N° 11 with a 2.3 petaflop peak. Other new oil and gas entries for 2013 are Saudi Aramco’s Makman, a 500 teraflop IBM iDataPlex DX360M4 cluster at N° 60 and Petrobras’ 350 teraflop Grifo06 Itautec cluster at N° 219.
The fastest Windows cluster is the 2012 entry of the Microsoft/HP ‘Faenov’ cluster running Windows Azure whose 167 teraflop bandwidth puts it at N° 241. Only three out of the 500 machines are cited as running Windows. Almost all the other TOP500 machines run Unix or Linux.
© Oil IT Journal - all rights reserved.