World's Fastest Computers: Get Cluster Speed Advice

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Information on the world's fastest computers can be found on resources like the Top500 list, which tracks supercomputers globally. A teraflop represents one trillion floating-point operations per second, while a megaflop equals one million operations per second. Newer personal computers typically operate at 10-20 gigaflops, significantly slower than supercomputers. Discussions also highlight the complexity of measuring a cluster's speed, which can depend on various factors like CPU performance and disk throughput. For accurate benchmarking, users are encouraged to consult with cluster administrators or utilize existing benchmarking tools.
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Fastest Computer

Where would I find information on the fastest computers in the world?
 
Computer science news on Phys.org
Sherwyn said:
Where would I find information on the fastest computers in the world?
Here is a http://www.top500.org/lists/2006/06"
 
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can u convert 280.6 TFlop/s to a more managable unit?
also, how fast is one megaflop
 
Well I do not understand your question.

A flop is one floating point operation (an operation on a non-integer).
 
How fast is a Teraflop?

Can someone convert 280.6 TFlop/s to more managable units?
also, how fast is a megaflop?
 
What exactly is a cluster?

How fast are the fastest clusters, and does anyone know how fast the cluster(s) is/are at the University of Richmond?
 
My mistake

how many flops/s can any ordinary pc run? and how would i compare that to the fastest (280.6 TFlop/s)
 
woops. not how fast, but how many flops are in a megaflop, or a teraflop?
 
  • #10
Sherwyn said:
woops. not how fast, but how many flops are in a megaflop, or a teraflop?
Mega and tera are both greek words.

Mega stands for 1 000 000
Tera stands for 1 000 000 000 000
 
  • #11
prefix mega means 10^6 over the basic unit.
prefix giga means 10^9 over the basic unit.
prefix terra means 10^12 ...

so there are 1.000.000.000.000 flops in a terra flop
1.000.000.000 flops in a giga flop and so on...

These prefixes can be applied to any unit, not just to flops(i.e. MegaByte but here is a kinda different story because the basic units are in bynary not decimal.)
 
  • #12
Sherwyn said:
woops. not how fast, but how many flops are in a megaflop, or a teraflop?
megaflop

A megaflop is a measure of a computer's speed and can be expressed as:
A million floating point operations per second
10 to the 6th power floating-point operations per second
2 to the 20th power FLOPS

http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,,sid9_gci212543,00.html

Also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petaflops

megaFLOPS (MFLOPS) is equal to one million floating-point operations per second, and a gigaFLOPS (GFLOPS) is equal to one billion floating-point operations per second. A teraFLOPS (TFLOPS) is equal to one trillion floating-point operations per second.

http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/F/FLOPS.html

You should be able to calculate it with this information.
 
  • #13
seaglespn said:
prefix mega means 10^6 over the basic unit.
prefix giga means 10^9 over the basic unit.
prefix terra means 10^12 ...
Well, 'terra' actually means 'ground' or 'land'. :wink:

It's 'tera' which is 1000 times bigger than 'giga'!
 
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  • #14
First, you know what the prefixes mean, right?

Kilo = 1,000
Mega = 1,000,000
Giga = 1,000,000,000
Tera = 1,000,000,000,000

For the processing power of pc's, hardware review sites have them. Here is a sample: http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/07/14/core2_duo_knocks_out_athlon_64/page16.html

Newer pc's are on the order of 10-20 gigaflops, so about 10,000 times slower than a supercomputer (which, incidentally, are often just clusters of several thousand desktop processors).
 
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  • #15
Sherwyn said:
How fast are the fastest clusters, and does anyone know how fast the cluster(s) is/are at the University of Richmond?
It is a term used in astrophysics, physics, chemistry, computer programming, computer disk drives. Maybe they have some really fast computers at the University of Richmond.

Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_(physics)" .

AM
 
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  • #16
Serious Help needed

how do i found out how to run a test on a cluster to find out the speed?
 
  • #17
Well that depends what you want to measure.
Is it pure CPU speed, for each CPU separately or on how they work togeter? Or is it disk throughput, like for some database application, network server performance? There are many things you can measure.

So it would help if you provided some more information.
 
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  • #18
Cluster Speed

How do i find out the speed of a cluster? I'm supposed to figure how to run a program to determine the speed of our cluster here at UR.
 
  • #19
That's a rather vague question, as we don't know anything about UR's cluster. This sounds like some kind of a lab, though, meaning you should probably have some sort of handout that provides help.

There may a simple benchmarking program provided for you. Or maybe you have to write your own. If you have to write your own, of course, you'd have to use some kind of cluster library (MPI, etc.) to distribute the work across all the nodes in the cluster, which could be difficult.

If you have some kind of background information, you should provide it as part of your question. Otherwise, there's really nothing we can do to help you.

- Warren
 
  • #20
I don't know really. I was told to just figure out how to determine how many megaflop/s its running and compare it to other clusters (specifically the faster ones). Should I have been given more information or what?
 
  • #21
Sherwyn said:
I don't know really. I was told to just figure out how to determine how many megaflop/s its running and compare it to other clusters (specifically the faster ones). Should I have been given more information or what?
Well perhaps you could give us some context. Do you work there or do you study there? And is this request in anyway related to a program you follow?

To me it seems rather odd to ask someone, who aparently is not an expert about computers ("what is tera and mega", "what is a cluster", "how fast is a teraflop"), on how you determine the combined CPU speed of a cluster.

This is certainly not a trivial problem!
 
  • #22
well, I am a freshman coming into the University of Richmond in the fall, and I am working with one of the physics professors and some of his students over the summer. I am in a program to help me get used the university and physics and whatnot.
 
  • #23
Honestly, the best way to find this information is to look up who administers the cluster, and ask him/her. As we've said over and over in your multitude of threads on the topic, it's not a trivial question, nor does it have a trivial answer. It's also possible that the information you seek is on a University webpage somewhere, and you just need to find it.

- Warren
 
  • #24
russ_watters said:
Newer pc's are on the order of 10-20 gigaflops, so about 10,000 times slower than a supercomputer (which, incidentally, are often just clusters of several thousand desktop processors).
There are also super computers called "vector processors" that have many very fast arithmetic units within them, enough so that peforming an operation like a floating point multiply on two arrays of numbers and either storing the results in a 3rd array or summing the results occurs at the fastest speed that the machines memory can retrieve the input data. In the case of Cray super-computers, a vector processing system can be part of a cluster. Here is one link: http://www.cray.com/products/x1e and antoher: http://www.nec.com.au/products_detail.aspx?view=145
 
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  • #25
Cluster Websites

I'm still having trouble finding a website about finding out a cluster's speed. Anyone know any decent websites?
 
  • #26
Cluster Websites

Anyone know any decent websites I could go to to learn about clusters and speeds and whatnot? I really need help on this one.
 
  • #27
Hello Sherwyn,

I have absolutely no experience with computer clusters. :blushing: But the wikipedia entry might be something to start with:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_cluster

As for speeds, there's a website/organisation that tries to keep track of all (known) supercomputers around the world. Here you can find the current top500 list:

http://www.top500.org/list/2006/06/100

Regards,

nazzard
 
  • #28
Where could I find Cluster codes

Where would i find codes to run for a cluster to determine its speed?
 
  • #29
Sherwyn,

Please do not post the same question multiple times. Your question is too vague to be answered as stated. Either come back to us and provide us the entire question or assignment you were given, or otherwise elaborate your question so that it actually has an answer.

As has been said, there are many different ways one can measure "speed" of a computer, and you're not giving us any information at all about what you're actually trying to do.

If you post this again, I will delete it.

- Warren
 
  • #30
Admin note:

I have merged nine (!) of Sherwyn's threads into this one. All of these threads dealt with the exact same topic, finding the "speed" of an unnamed cluster at the University of Richmond.

- Warren
 
  • #31
Kind of sounds like one of those cluster forks you read about sometimes :biggrin:
 
  • #32
Gokul43201 said:
Well, 'terra' actually means 'ground' or 'land'. :wink:

It's 'tera' which is 1000 times bigger than 'giga'!

Tera means Earth not ground ;) and its Latin not greek

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_(mythology )

Tera is greek (enna dio tri tessera (τετρα) penti hexi hepta.. etc etc)τετρα is similar to tera I suppose
 
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