in the November 2004

8 November 2004

Myrinet leads the November-2004 TOP500 interconnect ranking

The TOP500 list (www.top500.org), published twice a year since 1993 coordinated with the ISC conference in June and SC conference in November, ranks supercomputers worldwide according to their performance on the Linpack benchmark. The 24rd TOP500 list was released today at SC2004 in Pittsburgh.

A total of 193 (38.6%) of the Nov-2004 TOP500 supercomputers use Myrinet technology. In recognition of the importance of interconnect to supercomputer performance, the authors of the TOP500 list added to their database the interconnect used in each TOP500 system. See this TOP500 web page for the interconnect-family statistics for the Nov-2004 list.

In addition to supplying the interconnect for the largest number of TOP500 systems, the systems with Myrinet technology totaled 317,324 Rmax Gflops of computing performance, the most of any of the interconnects used in the Nov-04 TOP500.

The top Myrinet cluster in the Nov-04 TOP500 list is the Barcelona Supercomputer Center MareNostrum cluster, which ranked #4. MareNostrum is the fastest cluster in the world, and the fastest supercomputer in Europe. The 20.53-Tflops benchmark was run across 1782 IBM BladeCenter JS20 dual-PowerPC blades while the system was being installed. MareNostrum is the first cluster to use the new Myrinet switches for large clusters, and is the first blade system to achieve such a high TOP500 ranking. MareNostrum, a project of IBM and the Spanish government, now includes 2282 JS20 compute nodes and 41 storage servers.

Other notable Myrinet clusters near the top of the list are the NCSA Tungsten cluster, which dropped from the #5 to the #10 position; the new John Von Neumann cluster (#13) at the Army Research Laboratory; Red Grid (now #17), the fastest computer in China, at the Shanghai Supercomputer Center; and Lightning (now #18) at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Here is our tabulation of the 24 Myrinet clusters in the top 100 of the November-2004 TOP500. The full configurations of these clusters, including the types and numbers of hosts, can be found in the list at http://www.top500.org/.

Congratulations to the TOP500 authors, and to all of the TOP500 sites. We are now looking forward to the June-2005 TOP500 list.

8 November 2004