Position of Adelaide University's Orion Supercomputer
in the Top 500 List
[http://www.physics.adelaide.edu.au/ncflgt/top500context.html]
The 16th edition of the TOP500 list was published November 3rd, 2000 shortly before the Supercomputing 2000 (SC2000) Conference in Dallas, Texas, November 4 - 10, 2000. This edition of the actual list can be directly accessed by connecting HERE.
The Top 500 is a list of the fastest 500 supercomputers in the world based on the Linpack matrix solve benchmark. This is a suite of programs designed to test a wide variety of aspects of the computer's performance.
The Orion Supercomputer is the name of the Sun Technical Compute Farm at Adelaide University. Orion has a peak speed of 144 Gflops (i.e., 144 billion calculations per second) and has now achieved a Linpack benchmark result of 110 Gflops. [The term "flop" is an abbreviation for "floating point operation", i.e, one flop = one calculation. Also M = "mega" = million, G = "giga" = billion, and T = "tera" = trillion]. In other words Orion has an actual MEASURED performace of 110 billion calculations per second.
Orion will probably give a slightly higher result once the fast Myrinet networking is installed between the nodes, however a performance above 120 Gflops is unlikely without additional CPU's. It is remarkable and a credit to Sun Microsystems that MEASURED performance can get so close to the peak theoretical performance. This was a very pleasant surprise to the stakeholders in Orion and is due to the extremely good performance of the Sun Microsystems E420R nodes.
The fastest machine in the world is called "ASCI White", which is a 8192 processor machine at Lawrence Livermore National Labs in the U.S.A. rated at 4.9 Tflops, (i.e. 1 Tflops = 1,000 Gflops = 1,000,000 Mflops). The top 7 machines in the world all give benchmark results over 1 Tflop, and 18 machines have a theoretical peak speed of over 1 Tflop. The top 4 machines are all so-called "ASCI" machines, which are U.S. computers for simulating nuclear explosions.
Entry level to the Top 500 list is currently 55 Gflops, compared to 43 Gflops in the previous list and 33 Gflops before that.
Orion's result of 110 GFlops puts it at number 188 in the world.
Not many Australian machines make it into the Top 500 list, and only a few have made it into the top half of the list.
Currently Orion is the third fastest supercomputer in Australia.
Mail comments on these pages to awilliam@physics.adelaide.edu.au