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21 June 2001 Live issue from the Heidelberg Supercomputer Conference, June 2001Primeur Live! is published during majorSupercomputing and Grid events in Europe
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The Heidelberg Supercomputer Seminar is the main HPCN event in Europe. This year we publish two live issues from the event:
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My last article looked at the challenges for producing devices for Petaflop/s computing in the next ten years or so. It then went on to mention quantum computing and the inherent difficulties in developing Qubits with the necessary coherence to deliver stable usable devices for computing. The article below explores the reasons why in reality there is no civilian general purpose system capable to deliver sustained Teraflop/s performance within normal budgets of say 5-10 million US dollars a year. (author: Chris Lazou)
To study and possibly predict the global change of our planet, computer simulation is being used. Dr. Keiji Tani from the Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute presented an overview of the recent developments in the Earth Simulator project and explained how this project, started in 1997, will be heading to its completion in 2002. The system recently was expanded with a new very high-performance one-chip vector processor to couple the three-fold objective of earth observation, basic research, and simulation modelling.
At Los Alamos National Laboratory, the staff will be faced with a new challenge in the near future: the integration of the new ASCI-Q 30 Teraflop/s computer system, built by Compaq. The huge potential of this revolutionary system which represents the next step in the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI), was introduced at SC 2001 by Richard Kaufman from Compaq and by Ken Koch and John Morrison from Los Alamos. The speakers offered a realistic picture of the complex simulation tasks the ASCI-Q will have to deal with.
First speaker of the afternoon session at SC 2001 was Sid Karin, Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego, and former Director of the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI). Dr. Karin illustrated how the digital revolution is transforming high-performance computing from an isolated island into a multi-dimensional computing continuum. Frontiers between different technologies are breaking down rapidly and computing is turning into a universe of omnipresent and invisible interconnectivity. Today, we look in amazement to phenomena such as grid computing but frankly, we have not really seen anything yet.
In what has become a much-anticipated event in the world of high-performance computing, the 17th edition of the "TOP500" list of the world? fastest supercomputers was released today (June 21). The latest edition of the twice-yearly ranking finds IBM as the leader in the field, with 40 percent in terms of installed systems and 43 percent in terms of total performance of all the installed systems. In second place in terms of installed systems is Sun Microsystems with 16 percent, while Cray Inc. retained second place in terms of performance (13 percent). SGI Inc. was third both with respect to systems with 63 (12.6 percent) and performance (10.2 percent).
Europe is no longer present in the TOP10 of the world's fastest supercomputers. This can be concluded from the 17th TOP500 list of fastest supercomputer sites, presented at the Heidelberg SC2001 supercomputer conference. The fastest machine in Europe is Hitachi SR8000-F1/112 at the Leibniz Rechenzentrum in Muenchen Germany. It has a performance of just over 1 Tflop/s, measured as Rmax. It is the only European Tflop/s system in the list. Number 2, Fujitsu VPP5000/100 at the ECMWF in Reading, UK, has a performance of 886 Gflop/s. These are also the only machines in the TOP25.
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© 2001, Genias Benelux