The evolution of supercomputing PDF

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The evolution of supercomputing

These points caused me to wonder what supercomputing truly means in the era of big data analytics. Is the traditional speed-of-calculation concept still completely relevant in this new era? Are brute-force, number-crunching calculations the only thing we expect supercomputers to do? Are today’s supercomputers—of all stripes—being optimized for the most demanding big data analytics jobs as well? And do traditional supercomputing benchmarks—such as petaFLOPS (also known as quadrillions of FLOPS)—adequately capture the metrics that matter most in big data applications?

Just as important, how will supercomputing architectures need to evolve in the era of big data? Increasingly, organizations will be running their most extreme applications on massively parallel, big data cloud platforms. As that trend intensifies, big data clusters will need to be considered supercomputers. For starters, as we move into this new era, we need to ask ourselves whether the existing HPC benchmarks—petaFLOPS, gigateps, and so on —are sufficient to address all core big data workloads.

Fortunately, the supercomputing industry has already begun to address big data workloads in new performance benchmarks. Key among them is an alternative supercomputing benchmark called Graph 500, for which IBM is one of many organizations on the steering committee. Graph 500 is designed to measure supercomputer performance on the search and graph analysis functions at the heart of many leading-edge, big data applications. The metric denominates supercomputer big data performance in gigateps, which are billions of

traversed edges per second. They involve searching the graph of connections between every point in a data set.

However, a critical problem emerges that involves measuring the big data performance envelope of a supercomputer or any other integrated system—balancing processors, memory, storage, I/O, and interconnect in its architecture. However, Graph 500 doesn’t appear to benchmark configuration balance....