Clusters@TOP500 debuts TOP500 team is publishing a new list about high-performance clustersMannheim 15 March 2001 Reflecting the strong emerging trend of cluster computing in high-performance computing (HPC), the team which has compiled the TOP500 list of global supercomputing sites has developed a similar list to rank the world's top 100 cluster computing systems.
A variety of concepts and technologies are used to build these clusters and they are used for quite different applications. "It is quite possible that by the middle of this decade clusters in their myriad forms will be the dominant high-end computing architecture," said Thomas Sterling of the California Institute of Technology and the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in his editorial for the start of this new project.
Currently there is no publicly available basis which would allow the compilation of statistics about different technologies and the application areas of cluster computing. To provide a basis for these statistics about cluster computing, the TOP500 team therefore decided to assemble a separate list of high-performance computing clusters called "Clusters @ TOP500."
"This is similar to the situation in the general HPC market a decade ago before we started the TOP500 project," said Hans W. Meuer, Professor at the University of Mannheim, Germany, who began the work that led to the TOP500 Supercomputer lists. "Unfortunately, the coverage of cluster computing by the TOP500 is not sufficient to produce specialized statistics about this increasingly important HPC segment. This is mainly due to the scarcity of results of the Linpack benchmark on such systems."
The selection of an appropriate cluster specific benchmark for such a ranking is critical and the collection of results for it time consuming, according to Erich Strohmaier, a benchmarking expert at the U.S Department of Energy's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) and a member of the TOP500 team since it began. To promote the development of this new list the TOP500 team therefore decided to start the collection of data about high-performance clusters and rank them initially by peak-performance only.
At the same time TOP500 team is discussing with the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' Task Force on Cluster Computing (IEEE TFCC) the proper choice of a benchmark for ranking cluster.
"This benchmark will be used to rank the new cluster list once a sufficient number of results are available," said Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee and a member of the TOP500 Team. "In the meantime the HPC cluster community will already benefit from the available information about prevailing cluster technologies and applications."
The collection of information has already started and will continue on an ongoing basis. More background information, access to all collected data, and interfaces for submitting information about new cluster systems can be found at http://clusters.top500.org/
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