Observations on the new Top 500 list

Just did an short look on the new Top500 list:

• Wow ...A Constellation is an own architecture type in the Top 500 list</lu>
• The are just 9 Itanium systems left in the list.
• The total sum of Gigaflop per second increased from 11705491,49 on 2415203 to 16958600,19 on 3121579 procs. Thus the yield per CPU increased from 4,85 to 5,43 Gigaflops per proc.</a>
• By the way: Ten year ago, the list sumed up to 29367,61 gigaflops. That´s an performance increas of over 577 times in 10 years.
• When compare the actual increases with Moores law in it´s first derivation (Moore talked about transistor count, not performance), we see some interesting developments.Moores law suggests in it´s first derivation an increase in perfomance very 18 months. Over the 10,5 years period Moore´s law suggested an increase by the factor of 128. So the performance increase of the top 500 clusters was higher than Moores law suggest. The Top500 lists suggests a doubled performance in a little over 12 month instead on the long run.
• But this doubling is just correct when you look at the whole cluster. Let´s look at the CPU level and the list of 06/2007. In this list every CPU yielded 4.05 Gigaflop. The number of 06/2008 ist just increased by the factor of 1.3 in 18 month.
• Back to cluster level: In 06/2007 the TOP500 yielded 6974873 Gigaflop/second. In the following 18 months the the list showed an increase of 2.43 (as already mentioned, the total computing power of the Nov 2008 list was 16958600 GF/s)
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