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in the November 2002
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15 November 2002

140 of the November 2002 TOP500 use Myrinet

Recent TOP500™ lists show a large growth in clusters, and widespread use of Myrinet™ technology.

Myricom's Myrinet cluster-interconnect technology made another excellent showing in the November 2002 TOP500 list. This list includes 28 Beowulf-style Myrinet clusters and an additional 112 HP Superdome/Hyperplex systems. HyperFabric™ and Hyperplex™ are HP brands for Myrinet communication between HP Superdome™ SMP hosts.

A total of 140 or 28% of the November TOP500 supercomputer sites use Myrinet technology.

Fifteen of the top 100 systems are Beowulf-style Myrinet clusters, led by a 768-node, 1536-processor system at the Forecast System Laboratory, NOAA, ranking #8 at 3337 Gflops.

"The Myricom technical team is very pleased with the concrete evidence from recent TOP500 lists that clusters and Myrinet are having a growing and positive impact on high-performance technical computing," commented Chuck Seitz, CEO and CTO of Myricom.

The TOP500 list (www.top500.org), published twice a year at the ISC conferences in June and at the SC conferences in November, ranks supercomputers worldwide according to their performance on the LINPACK benchmark. This 20th TOP500 list was published on 15 November prior to SC2002 in Baltimore. The TOP500 authors also maintain a special list for clusters, "Clusters@TOP500," clusters.top500.org.

The TOP500 list nearly defines what is meant by a "supercomputer" and has revealed some interesting trends throughout the last decade. Clusters are now the fastest growing category of supercomputers in the TOP500. Clusters started to appear in the TOP500 list in 1997 with the Berkeley NOW (Network of Workstations), a Myrinet cluster of 100 UltraSPARC-I computers that ranked #479 in the June 1997 TOP500 list with a LINPACK performance of 10.14 Gflops. According to the classification used by the TOP500 authors, there are 93 clusters (18.6%) in the November 2002 list, up from 80 clusters in the June 2002 list, 43 clusters in the November 2001 list, and 33 clusters in the June 2001 list.

Although nearly all of the TOP500 are distributed-memory systems, the TOP500 authors reserve the cluster classification for systems in which the interconnect is not proprietary. Thus, a system such as the IBM SP, which is a cluster architecture that uses IBM-proprietary interconnect, is classified as an MPP rather than as a cluster.

Here is a rundown on the 15 Beowulf-style Myrinet clusters in the top 100 of the November 2002 TOP500 list. All 15 of these systems use Linux™, and most of the newer and higher ranked systems use Intel® Xeon™ processors. This list is interesting for the wide geographic distribution of these clusters, their variety of purposes, and the diversity of suppliers, including five self-made clusters.

One new system that just barely missed the deadline for the November 2002 TOP500 entries is a new, HP, 128-host, dual 900MHz Itanium-2™ cluster at Ohio Supercomputer Center (www.osc.edu). The 761.98 Gflops LINPACK performance of this Myrinet/Linux cluster is a superb 82.68% of peak, a great demonstration of the capabilities of Itanium-2 systems in clusters with Myrinet components and software.

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15 November 2002