El Capitan: New supercomputer is the fastest

This is great but I absolutely love that poster of el capitan on the supercomputer racks ! Also TIL there is a list of top500 at https://www.top500.org/lists/top500/2024/11/

That's a pretty standard Cray feature for systems larger than a few cabinets. El Capitan has the landscape, Hopper at NERSC had a photo of Grace Hopper, Aurora at ANL has a creamy gradient reminiscent of the Borealis, and on and on. Gives them a bit of character beyond the bad-ass Cray label on the doors.

I've always loved these charts. The Numerical Wind Tunnel, #1 in 1993, achieved 124.2 gigaflops on the Linpack benchmark.

In comparison, the iPhone 15 Pro Max cellphone, released in 2023, delivers approximately 2150 gigaflops.

I once drew the chart backwards. I think my PC in 2013 would have been the fastest on Earth in 1990. And faster than every computer combined in about 1982.[0]

[0] might not be accurate

2Tflops was #500 in 2006. Still a supercomputer. Crazy.

https://www.top500.org/statistics/perfdevel/

Those Gflop/s quoted for the iPhone must be FP32 Gflop/s.

The Gflop/s quoted in the past for supercomputers and now for big HPC clusters are FP64 Gflop/s.

The difference in cost between FP64 and FP32 is currently extremely high, much higher than it has ever been in the history of computer technology.

The reason is not technical, but of market segmentation, because NVIDIA, then also AMD, have removed the ability to do FP64 operations at a competitive rate from their "consumer" GPUs, so the best that one can get in performance per dollar is AMD 9950X (which can approach 2 FP64 Tflop/s per CPU, i.e. 256 FP64 FMA per clock cycle multiplied by around 4 GHz, with 2 flops per FMA).

> I absolutely love that poster of el capitan on the supercomputer racks

It looks good, but I miss the blinking lights of the olden days. Of course, they don't make sense on a supercomputer that's not designed to be seen, but they are still cool.