Update.
Originally posted by nek
The Virginia Tech supercomputer will rank high and very high if you consider the cost, but it will only place in 4th if you compare it to last year's list. There will be other computers which are new to the list.
For example, in june IBM said they were building a computer for Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) which is supposed to have an rPeak of 11.168 Tflops. I don't know if it was completed and tested, I'm just saying that there may be other supercomputers competing for the top 5.
Other than the Earth Simulator very few computers are 80% efficient (Rmax/Rpeak) so the IBM AIST computer will not threaten Virgina Tech's--that 16.9 TFlops Rpeak means that the Rmax can continue to inch up.
As for other computers appearing on the list, my previous post has addressed it: the only one new one that competes with Apple is HP's Itanium system. Traditionally large computers such as those have taken many years to set up so it is very predictable.
If you look at the list today, you'll see that the VATech cluster has jumped to an RMax of 9.55 Tflops from 8.17 earlier and 7.5 in the original post! That's approaching a 60% efficiency.
This is significant because
it places the Apple cluster 3rd on the list, ahead of the HP cluster. Now, only the ASCII Q, LANL's 8160 processor Alpha system, and the Earth Simulator, a custom NEC monster, are more powerful! Too bad that this probably didn't make the Fall Top500 but very good news indeed and probably deserves some reporting (Arn?).
I'm inclined to believe that Infiniband opened the door so that a small university could build a top10 supercomputing cluster in a short time at a small cost. Virginia Tech jumped on it and Apple happened to be the best price/performance with a delivery date within the timeframe to make the Top500 (in fact, it looks like they may have cut it too close).
Now that the cat is out of the bag, we may be witnessing a sea change toward clusters based on PC CPUs over the next couple years. 970-based will still have the edge over the Itanium, Pentium Xeon, and Opterons because it's Rpeak is so large and there is little doubt that IBM be hitting their target speeds, but I don't expect these servers to necessarily be coming from Apple.
The Linux blade and rack vendors who supply datacenters and renderfarms should seriously be looking at the 970 to complement their Opteron and Itanium systems.
Looks like IBM has a winner of a chip in the HPC market.
Take care,
