TMO Analysis - The Fastest Mac Compared to Today's Supercomputers
by , 4:15 PM EST, November 17th, 2008
When we run benchmarks on desktop systems, especially Macs, we tend to use standard benchmarks that relate to typical tasks: Photoshop, rendering, Quake, and so on. However, supercomputers are benchmarked on how fast they can run floating point computations in a parallel computing network with tens of thousands of nodes. On the same basis, how do those computers compare to each other?
The world's fastest computer computers are benchmarked every year at the supercomputing conference. Supercomputing 08 "SC08" is currently under way in Austin, Texas and brings together the world's experts from government and industry on supercomputing technologies.
 "Roadrunner" at Los Alamos National Laboratory, NM (2008) |
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These computers are benchmarked with software called "Linpack" which assesses how fast a computer can solve a system of linear equations. The metric is the speed of the computer in floating point operations per second, FLOPS.
In late 2008, two computers were benchmarked at over a petaflop, (quadrillion floating points operations per second) "Roadrunner" at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, and "Jaguar" at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. They achieved 1.105 and 1.059 petaflops respectively. They do that by connecting a large number of discrete computers, called nodes, amounting to hundreds of thousands of cores, with a high speed network, called Infiniband. Linux is the favored operating system because it can be tailored to suit the needs of computer scientists and has developed a mature interface to Infiniband.
To make the "Top500" list, the fastest 500 computers in the world, a system must be capable of at least 12.6 teraflops (trillion floating point operations per second).
Comparison to Mac Pro
How would the fastest Macintosh compare? Let's take a Mac Pro running at, say, 3.2 GHz and 8 cores. Each core of a Xeon has two floating point processors and can actually complete two floating point operations for each "tick" of the system clock. (It does that with a neat trick that combines a multiply and an add operation in one clock cycle.).
 Apple Mac Pro |
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As a result, our Mac pro can theoretically achieve:
3.2 GHz * 2 FPUs * 2 FLOPs per cycle * 8 cores = 102 gigaflops.
In practice, it's possible to achieve an efficiency of about 89 percent with Linpack on a Mac Pro, according to Dr. Srinidhi Varadarajan at Virginia Tech University. So the net computational power of the Mac Pro is 91 gigaflops using that benchmark.
That's a ratio of 12,142 to 1 in speed for Roadrunner at Los Alamos. Roadrunner, by the way, cost US$120M, about 27,270 times as much as a $4,400 Mac Pro, so we're actually getting a computational bargain, at least in terms of gigaflops per dollar.
 The CRAY-1 at Los Alamos (circa 1976) |
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Here's a thought. The very first Cray, the CRAY-1, installed in 1976 at Los Alamos was only capable of 100 megaflops. A Mac Pro is about a thousand times faster.
Apple no longer participates in the annual Supercomputing conference, as they did ever since the year 2000. The company has taken a different, more consumer oriented direction -- and probably has made a lot more money in the process.
Observer Comments
QuoteYou know, I bet that's a big part of why Cray computers are so closely associated with the term "super computer". At the very least, the case design had enough notoriety to gain a bunch of publicity.Tiger wrote:
Even in 1976, Cray understood that aesthetics had their important place.
While 'aesthetics' may have been on the mind of the Cray engineers, the real reason the systems were circular in nature was to reduce the length of wire between each logic node. They were mostly constructed with ECL or PECL logic and at any one time there would be more than one bit of information 'in flight' between nodes on the short wires. It also provides a better thermal solution to keeping all the power hungry ECL logic from melting off the circuit boards.
QuoteOh, I'm sure the design served a practical purpose, but even so, some of the most memorable designs through the ages have a special look to them.Guest wrote:
While 'aesthetics' may have been on the mind of the Cray engineers, the real reason the systems were circular in nature was to reduce the length of wire between each logic node.
QuoteGuest wrote:
What does this article have to do with Macs? The Intel Xeon processors are doing all the work, and you could put those in any computer.
This should be called "Intel Xeon Processors Compared to Today's Supercomputers"... and even in that context it's not a great article.
Nevertheless, it's quite interesting.
QuoteGuest wrote:
What does this article have to do with Macs? The Intel Xeon processors are doing all the work, and you could put those in any computer.
Like the Mac Pro? That is after all what the Mac Pro uses.
http://www.apple.com/macpro/
Given how Apple has positioned and advertised the Mac Pro/PowerMac line (remember the ad with all of the tanks a few years back) and the number of highly placed supercomputers built out of networked Macs
http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2008/07/24/virginia-tech-building-supercomputer-out-of-324-mac-pros
this is very related to Macs.
It would be interesting as Guest above mentioned, to run Linpack on a top end MacPro to see where it stands. I'll volunteer to do it if someone just gives me the top end Mac (and lets me keep it afterwards).
QuoteGuest wrote:
What does this article have to do with Macs? The Intel Xeon processors are doing all the work, and you could put those in any computer.
This should be called "Intel Xeon Processors Compared to Today's Supercomputers"... and even in that context it's not a great article.
The overall design of the logic board, RAM, type/speed of drives, all effect the overall speed of a computer. Therefore a MacPro could be significantly different (good or bad) compared to any random PC with the same processors.
Good design is about more than just aesthetics. For examples of useless design where looks are for look's sake look at examples of Victorian design. (or AlienWare ; ) ) Good design is the ability to combine aesthetics with an item's practical use. In design school the concept of "gestalt" was hammered into our heads where the whole is greater than the sum of it's parts.
Apple's been able to nail this concept almost every time. (Cray did a good job too, btw)
You forgot the network.. Linpack (for supercomputers)
is a parallel application, meaning that network that
you have connecting the machines is a very (very) deal.
and can have a tremendous impact on performance.
Roadrunner has a fast IB link and we have put a fair
amount of effort into making the application layer
that sits between the network hardware and the
Linpack low latency..
Thu Nov 20, 2008 1:29 pm Subject: What about graphics?
Yeah, even today when the word "supercomputer" is used I still think of the SF design of the Cray-1. It was featured in several movies and even today looks state-of-the-art.
However, raw calculation is one thing, while display is another. Display for all that computer power back in 1976 was still in the Model-T age. Today with the latest GPU technology for 3D rendering from companies like Nvidia, there is no comparison about getting useful information from today's top-line PC (or Mac Pro) and an equivalent-speed older supercomputer.
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