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in the June 2003
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23 June 2003

178 of the June 2003 TOP500 use Myrinet

Myricom's Myrinet® cluster-interconnect technology made another significant gain in the June 2003 TOP500 list. This list includes 51 Beowulf-style Myrinet clusters, up from 28 in the November 2002 list. In addition, the list includes 127 HP Superdome/Hyperplex systems. HyperFabric™ and Hyperplex™ are HP brands for Myrinet communication between HP Superdome™ SMP hosts.

A total of 178 (35.6%) of the June 2003 TOP500 supercomputer sites use Myrinet technology, up from 140 (28%) in the November 2002 list.

Seventeen of the top 100 systems are Myrinet clusters, led by the 768-node, 1536-processor system at the Forecast System Laboratory, NOAA, which ranks #11 at 3337 Gflops.

The TOP500 list (www.top500.org), published twice a year prior to the ISC conference in June and the SC conference in November, ranks supercomputers worldwide according to their performance on the LINPACK benchmark. This 21st TOP500 list was published on 23 June prior to the 18th International Supercomputer Conference (ISC2003) in Heidelberg, Germany.

Clusters are the fastest growing category of supercomputers in the TOP500. A cluster first appeared 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 149 clusters in the June 2003 list, up from 93 clusters in November 2002, 80 in June 2002 , 43 in November 2001, and 33 in June 2001.

Although nearly all of the TOP500 supercomputers 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. HP HyperFabric is also classified as a proprietary interconnect.

Here is a rundown on the top 30 Myrinet clusters in the June 2003 TOP500 list. All 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 six self-made clusters.

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23 June 2003