Top 500 supercomputers by processor family | Hacker News Reader

Top 500 supercomputers by processor family

en.wikipedia.org

57 pointsmceachen29 comments

Can I just point out how much I hate those sand charts? You can only tell what the bottom most variable is doing. How big is the AMD segment when intel was rapidly rising? You can't tell because slope hides line width. Want to know the trajectory of the other small players? Too bad.

Don't use sand charts kids.

Yeah I can here to say this. It's almost impossible to actually figure out what's going on

> Don't use sand charts kids.

And what would you use as an alternative? It would take a LOT of bars to display this information during the 90s as a grouped bar chart.

> And what would you use as an alternative?

Non-cumulative line charts. As usually is the answer to that question.

As a bonus, you can break line charts by line, and you can zoom parts of it.

> Non-cumulative line charts.

I suppose. But a chart with 23 different lines is quite difficult to read in my experience.

I.e., visually distinguishing that many lines from each other is not easy.

A chart with 23 different series is hard to read in any format. That's why being able to break it down by line is good.

I can see all 23 trends in the sand chart at least. 23 lines on a line chart would be nothing but visual noise to me. I can barely parse the line charts on TIOBE which have only 10 lines.

Stacked chart makes sense here, because the sum is constant.

What does not make sense is slanted lines; they draw different, slanted shapes that don't convey information.

Instead, a stacked bar chart would be appropriate.

It's also hard to offer so many distinct saturated colors, and color + pattern does not work all that well for small slivers like IBM 3090. A palette of appropriately contrasting colors (different hues, intensities, and saturations) would work better.

That would still be a mess, in mostly the same way. All it does is emphasize that the values have a coarse 1-year sampling rate.

The real mistake is that the most rapidly-changing values should have been in the middle, with the slowly-changing values at both top and bottom. This would help align the values from one sample to the next, making them easier to follow across the chart.

Sand charts are just pie charts rotated through hyperspace, and therefore bad.

Any Wikipedia engineers here? Being linked, on desktop, to this file represents an exercise in futility.

I want to read the full article we were linked to. My click targets, in order:

'x' - 'x' closes things. Can I close this modal to see the full page? No, it closes and redirects back to this page on HN.

'more details'? No, it brings me to a details page about the graph image. Cool, it's used on some other pages. Useless as a reader.

'black space' around the image? Not a clickable target, why would I click there?

Can I zoom in? No, the image auto-resizes but the image viewer chrome zooms in — making the image smaller??

Am I just a bad Wikipedia user?

Agreed, I went through a similar flow.

Direct link to the image: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ef/Pr...

Article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOP500

The linked article was actually https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercomputer

For me, the X closed the lightbox and left me looking at the 'Supercomputer' article. This is in desktop Firefox.

This is missing a big portion of the picture: GPUs and other heterogeneously attached accelerators.

For more detailed information visit https://www.top500.org/ instead of the wikipedia article.

Here you go: https://www.top500.org/statistics/list/

tldr: Nvidia V100 and P100 dominate when you look at the number of systems, while the NVIDIA Volta GV100 dominates the performance chart.

I wonder if the x86 dominance has declined slightly since 2015 - I know the #1 supercomputer is currently a POWER machine, and there have been some Chinese supercomputers that use their own manycore cpus with what I think is a MIPS-inspired ISA

It has begun to, in favor of AMD64 - with the Epyc processors which appeared in mid-2017:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epyc

they've been generally competitive (probably much more so when you factor price in). Now, with Rome having come out, their market share is supposedly increasing quite rapidly, since apparently it trounces Intel's Xeon offerings.

GP said "x86 dominance" not Intel x86 dominance, for what it's worth. AMD64 is x86-64.

It hasn't declined any more than pepsi and coca cola have declined, and there's no reason to believe it ever will. MIPS is gone. Power architecture being open sourced likely means IBM no longer has a business interest in it. This is what business folks call shakeout. It's what intellectuals would call the "end of history" for the microprocessor, similar to the fall the USSR. Big money research has moved on to quantum processors.

Speaking as someone who's an avid reader of open source codebases, I kind of wish more of my colleagues would accept this, because it really stymies progress in open source that folks continue supporting huge amounts of code that today are mostly only used by folks doing things like emulating Sega Saturn on an FPGA for fun.

Note that statistics tend to be different if you focus on the top 10 or top 5 systems (not represented in the linked chart).

That color scheme makes my eyes bleed. Whoever thought black-on-dark-blue was a good choice?

I'm viewing this on a 99% sRGB screen and none of the dark blue boxes in the key are discernable

Anecdata, but I have a calibrated screen with about 95% AdobeRGB coverage, and the dark boxes and lines are very clearly distinguishable. Is your screen calibrated? Is something off with your contrast setting? Maybe a very bright backlight ruins the contrast ratio at the darker end?

(I agree, however, that it's not a very attractive color scheme, and not a terribly informative graph anyway. A simple X-Y plot would be better.)

These screens are factory calibrated (supposedly, but they included a colorimeter report in the box) and they're all consistent several years later so I'm guessing so. Maybe its gamma? Or maybe you're on OSX? (IIRC apple devices use gamma 2.2 by default and Windows does 1.8? I think?) Our difference could totally be because of default gamma.

I'm on Linux, and my gamma is calibrated to 2.2. 1.8 sounds way too low, I think! sRGB is roughly a 2.2 gamma curve, and a lot of professional media is done for screens expected to have a gamma of 2.4.

Do you think ARM will ever make it in this list?

Fugaku should do it.

Given that the future of at least a subset of HPC is spreading out super parallel calculation to lots of GPUs via fast interconnects, it is certainly conceivable that ARM based systems can do that as well as x86 system.

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