In his article The New Face of the TOP500, Gil Shainer of Mellanox Technologies notes the change in the composition of the list, remarking that there has been a shift from pure high-performance computing (HPC) to include enterprise-based solutions such as enterprise datacenter (EDC)-based, interconnected, rack-mounted systems. He goes on to analyze the historical and current technological trends in HPC and provide an updated analysis model for the TOP500 project.

Unlike the HPC market, Shainer finds the EDC market less tolerant of change and prone to accept only those solutions the HPC market has adopted. He identifies this as the era of clustered commodity servers in the case of both markets, where their tremendous price/performance benefits, unparalleled flexibility in deployment, and reduced long-term maintenance propel their adoption.

While the use of off-the-shelf commodity and standard components has made its mark on the interconnect solutions, Shainer observes, making Gigabit Ethernet and InfiniBand the dominant solutions, it has become the case that "The main reasons for [the predominance of one over the other is] that the superior performance and the advanced HPC-related features of InfiniBand over 10GigE, such as congestion control, adaptive routing and extremely low CPU overhead" have tipped the scales in favor of InfiniBand. This is a trend that he predicts will continue as the number of proprietary interconnects diminishes while the number of standard interconnects grows.

"The use of proprietary interconnect solutions for clusters has been reduced from 70 percent in November 2005 to less than 20 percent in November 2007, indicating the market preference for standard components (which nowadays also provide superior performance and price/performance). The use of InfiniBand is not solely for clusters, since many MPP-based systems use InfiniBand interconnects as well. Another interesting point is the non-existence of 10GigE-based solutions. The main reasons for that is the superior performance and the advanced HPC-related features of InfiniBand over 10GigE, such as congestion control, adaptive routing and extremely low CPU overhead," Shainer writes.

A further distinction Shainer has discovered lies in the extent to which HPC applications fully utilize a system's compute resources and, therefore, do not require virtualization. EDC implementations, on the other hand, are not compute intensive and, as a consequence, require virtualization in order to increase system productivity.

"Virtualization enables running multiple environments or multiple applications on the same compute system in order to maximize the CPU utilization. This solution creates the same load on the interconnect, as more throughput is required between servers and between servers and storage. While HPC and virtualized EDC environments are different from the application perspective, they require the same characteristics from the cluster interconnect," Shainer writes.

The author notes, too, that a number of the sites included on the TOP500 List involve systems that are not used on a daily basis in HPC applications. He remarks that, given the prevalence of clustering, "...where clusters have become the dominant solution across the different markets. Clustering enables single servers to scale up and form a supercomputer, even if it is just for one day."

As a result of this development, Shainer recommends dividing the list in two, reserving "...the upper part [for] the top 100 systems, which continue to truly represent the HPC market, and the lower part, which represents the cluster market -- both HPC and EDC."

Shainer sees his TOP100 list as comprising "...clusters with 51 percent of the entries (up from the 41 percent on the November 2005 list) and MPPs with 47 percent (down from 55 percent on the November 2005 list). As observed in the recent lists, clusters continue to show a strong growth and have become the preferred solutions for HPC systems." Of the remaining TOP400, Shainer numbers almost 90 percent as clusters and the remaining 10 percent as MPPs.

Probing further into this list, Shainer finds that, "The demand for standard components exists throughout the TOP500 list, and in the lower segment, InfiniBand and GigE connect almost 90 percent of the systems (347 systems out of 400) and 95 percent of these systems are marked as clusters (336 out of 355). The domination of clusters and standard interconnects will continue to exist in the future years, as this architecture provides great flexibility of scaling, from single nodes to large systems, and has superior price/performance over other architectures."

In summary, the author finds that in both the HPC and EDC markets the need is similar, calling for faster storage, which mandates the use of a high throughput and low latency I/O solution. This, in turn, calls for the increasing use of InfiniBand, the only industry-standard interconnect capable of providing the necessary bandwidth, latency, power and utilization characteristics, he concludes. [...read more...]

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