With the release of the latest TOP500 list last week, the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS) reports continued leadership in high performance computing in Europe. The JUQUEEN supercomputer at GCS member the Jülich Supercomputing Centre defended its #8 while the 3 Petaflop SuperMUC at LRZ moved to the number 12 position.
The now captured positions of the GCS supercomputers are especially worth mentioning as neither system underwent any hardware upgrades in the last 18 months. Both LRZ’s SuperMUC as well as the supercomputing infrastructure at the High Performance Computing Centre Stuttgart (HLRS) will see system expansions in the forthcoming year. To date, HLRS’s supercomputer Hermit holds a very strong 3rd position in the TOP500-sublist for industrially used supercomputers with its peak performance of 1.09 Petaflops.
Doing Well on HPCG: A New Benchmark
Special attention was paid at ISC’14 to a brand new gender of HPC benchmark, the HPCG (High Performance Conjugate Gradient). While the Linpack benchmark, which serves as metrics for the TOP500, measures the speed and efficiency of linear equation calculations of a system, the HPCG benchmark tries to reflect changed customer requirements. It does not focus on raw CPU performance but stresses the system balance, e. g. floating point and communication bandwidth and latency, and it tightens the focus on messaging, memory, and parallelization—parameters that add up to an “averaged” yet from the users’ perspective more beneficial and thus more important system performance.
Once again, GCS centre Leibniz Supercomputing Centre acted as pioneer in these customer oriented efforts. It was one of only 15 supercomputing centres world wide to submit data for the HPCG benchmark. With a performance of 83.3 Teraflops, showing an efficiency rate of 2.9 per cent of the peak system performance, SuperMUC at first go captured position 6 on the HPCG ranking. “With its ability to execute HPCG extremely efficiently, SuperMUC demonstrates once again how powerful the system is in supporting many areas of science,“ adds Professor Bode, Director of the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre. „We are proud to see this reflected in the excellent HPCG position with SuperMUC being number 6 in the world.“
The HPCG benchmark was initiated by Linpack co-founder Professor Dr. Jack Dongarra (University of Tennessee, USA) well over a year ago.
