IDC reports latest supercomputer rankings based on the IDC balanced rating testFramingham 16 May 2002 IDC has reported the newest rankings of supercomputer performance based on its comprehensive standard test, called the IDC Balanced Rating. The test, developed with extensive input from the high-performance computing (HPC) community, is important because industrial competitiveness and scientific progress depend on this most-powerful class of computers.
"Despite the strategic and economic importance of supercomputers and HPC systems, there have been no generally available databases or tools for analysing and comparing these complex technologies along the multiple dimensions which highlight overall system performance", stated Debra Goldfarb, IDC group vice president, Worldwide Systems and Servers. "User organisations need a source of common system specification data, and top-level tools for sorting through various aspects of the technologies to better understand and explain how different computer architectures match their requirements. The IDC Balanced Rating provides one such top-level analysis and ranking."
The latest rankings list 893 currently installed HPC systems in four market segments. "Our goal is to document as many of the world's installed HPC systems as possible, and make the data available for free to the entire HPC community", stated Earl Joseph II, IDC Research Director, Worldwide Systems and Servers.
The four market segments are: The IDC Balanced Rating focuses on three broad performance areas:
"Data for some tests within the IDC Balanced Rating are readily available, such as the Linpack test that measures aspects of processor performance", stated Joseph. "Some vendors have not yet run all the other tests that are important for assessing a system's overall capabilities, or don't have results yet for all of their listed systems. The IDC Balanced Rating is a major step forward today and will become increasingly valuable over time, as the data picture is expanded and as the approach evolves." Joseph said that draft results of the latest IDC Balanced Rating were circulated several times within the HPC User Forum, a group of U.S. high-performance computing users from government, industry and academia, and to others within the global HPC community. "Any new measurement scheme like this needs time to mature. For this second edition of the IDC Balanced Rating, as with the first edition, we made a concerted effort to involve a large number of reviewers and incorporate their constructive feedback." Mrs. Goldfarb announced that the Department of Defense (DoD) High Performance Computing Modernisation Programme (HPCMP), along with the HPC User Forum, plans to fund a 12-month effort at approximately $250,000 to develop an integrated set of tools and methodologies for performance modelling and performance prediction of large applications on HPC systems. Mr. Larry Davis of the DoD HPCMP said that Allan Snavely and Laura Carrington of the San Diego Supercomputer Center will lead the development effort. Data from this effort will be used to further strengthen and support the scientific underpinnings of the IDC Balanced Ratings, as well as the HPC User Forum-sponsored user benchmark tool that will allow each user to set his or her own weightings for various system attributes that can then be used to compared potential HPC systems for a given workload. These are the ten fastest technical capability computers, according to the IDC Balanced Ratings:
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