In this sponsored post, Matthew Ziegler at Lenovo discusses today’s metric for raw speed of compute. Much like racing cars, servers do “time trials” to gauge their performance relative to a given workload. There are more Spec or Web benchmarks out there for servers than there are racetracks and drag strips. Perhaps the most important measure is the raw calculating throughput that a system delivers: FLOPS, or Floating-Point Operations Per Second.
For the first time, all TOP500 Systems are Petaflop Machines
The latest TOP500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers is out today, marking a major milestone in the 26-year history of the list. For the first time, all 500 systems deliver a petaflop or more on the Linpack benchmark. “Frontera at TACC is the only new supercomputer in the top 10, which attained its number five ranking by delivering 23.5 petaflops on HPL. The Dell C6420 system, powered by Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 processors.”