Sequoia HPC tops new Graph 500 ranking of Big Data machines
The Graph 500 ranking of the most powerful supercomputers at handling Big Data workloads has been introduced to complement the Top500 HPC list.
By Joab Jackson
The Graph 500 ranking of the most powerful supercomputers at handling Big Data workloads has been introduced to complement the Top500 HPC list.
So while a new Cray supercomputer took first place on the Top500, it was another machine, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Sequoia, that proved to be the most adept at processing data intensive workloads on the Graph 500.
Such differences in ranking between the two scales highlight the changing ways in which the world’s most powerful supercomputers are being used. An increasing number of high performance computing (HPC) machines are being put to work on data analysis, rather than the traditional duties of modeling and simulation.
“I look around the exhibit floor of the Supercomputing 2012 conference, and I’m hard-pressed to find a booth that is not doing Big Data or analytics. Everyone has recognised that data is a new workload for HPC,” said David Bader, a computational science professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology who helps oversee the Graph 500.
The Graph 500 was created to chart how well the world’s largest computers handle such data intensive workloads. The latest edition of the list was released at the SC12 supercomputing conference, being held this week in Salt Lake City.
In a nutshell, the Graph 500 benchmark looks at “how fast a system can trace through random memory addresses,” Bader said. With data intensive workloads, “the bottleneck in the machine is often your memory bandwidth rather than your peak floating point processing rate,” he added.
David A. Bader
Distinguished Professor and Director of the Institute for Data Science
David A. Bader is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Computer Science at New Jersey Institute of Technology.