Information from TOP500, EnterTheGrid used to enrich supercomputer overview report

Almere 26 August 2002 Recently, the report "Overview of recent Supercomputers - 2002" by Aad van der Steen has been published. It provides a detailed description of supercomputer systems. In this way, it complements the TOP500 list, that tells which machines or the most powerful currently and EnterTheGrid, that provides a description of the companies. However, if one is interested in combining the information from these three sources in their original formats, that is a tedious job. However, we made all three sources available in XML-format. Combining information and extracting knowledge is then an easier task. We did produce a version of the report that, for each supercomputer architecture section in the Overview report, also lists the TOP500 entries in the June 2002 list, and the latest company description from EnterTheGrid. Summary information has been extracted from the XML-sources and is presented too. The thus enriched report is available as a PDF-file.

The TOP500 list of supercomputers is updated twice a year. It lists the 500 most powerful machines in the world. The current list is available from TOP500 list of supercomputers. Primeur/EnterTheGrid analysis provides a version in XML.

EnterTheGrid is the largest catalogue on Grid computing, including HPC, in the world. It is natively in XML already.

Hence we had to convert the report "Overview of recent Supercomputers - 2002" to be able to combine the three sources. The raw XML-file is available from the Primeur/EnterTheGridhttp://EnterTheGrid.com/analysis/ors/database/manual.xml (Can take some time to download.) This file includes a number of other ones. Modern browsers that recognise XML, may automatically include these files. If you go to the directory: http://EnterTheGrid.com/analysis/ors/database/ You can see the individual files. These are the individual report chapters and, in the include directory, the description of the systems and processors in a special developed XML-format.

The XML format allows us to easily, and seamlessly integrate the data from the other sources in the report, creating an enriched version. To this end we developed several XSLT-templates. XSLT is an XML-transformation language. We did use XSL-FO as (XML Stylesheet Language) as an intermediate format to create a PDF file: http://EnterTheGrid.com/analysis/ors/manuals/manual.pdf (900 Kbyte)

The XML version is combined with information from other supercomputing information sources that are also available in XML. To be specific: this way, the report has been augmented with:

  • For each system, all machines in the current TOP500 list of supercomputers are listed.
  • A summary table has been added. The average age of system architectures is calculated
  • A description from the company, taken from the EnterTheGrid catalogue has been added.

The original report is available from: http://www.phys.uu.nl/~steen/web02/overview02.html.

Ad Emmen

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