Looking at raw data: InfiniBand went down again from 205 in June 2016 to 178 in June 2017. Just 2 years ago it was at 257. OmniPath has gone up from 8 in June 2016 to now 38. All other technologies are essentially flat. InfiniBand does at least accelerate nearly 50% of Petaflop clusters (the big ones), and the efficiency is far better than OmniPath.
From HPCwire:
hpcwire.com
This minimal list reshuffling led Top500 watcher and market analyst Addison Snell to comment, “With no changes in the Top 10 systems other than the Piz Daint upgrade, it may look like things aren’t moving forward, but this is the lull before a spate of new supercomputers that could hit the next list, particularly the two CORAL pre-exascale systems at U.S. national labs and the possibility of the Chinese Tienhe-2A upgrade.
“Some of the more interesting trends occur over the rest of the list population,” the CEO of Intersect360 Research continued. “For example, the number of manycore systems continues to rise, whether as accelerators or co-processors, which are mostly Nvidia GPUs, or with the Intel Xeon Phi as a standalone processor. This is driving related improvements in power efficiency, which is necessary in the run-up to exascale. It’s also notable to see Intel Omni-Path adoption continuing on the list. We are monitoring this in our end-user surveys to see how much penetration Omni-Path might have versus Ethernet and InfiniBand.”
Gigabit Ethernet is now at 207 systems (unchanged), in large part thanks to 194 systems now using 10G interfaces. Note: Mellanox Ethernet solutions also connect several of the 10 Gigabit Ethernet, all of the 40 Gigabit Ethernet systems and the first 100 Gigabit Ethernet system. InfiniBand technology is now found on 178 systems, down from 187 systems, and is the second most-used internal system interconnect technology. |
