IDEAS recently attended a briefing where a similar chart to the one below was featured. It shows how in just over a decade, commodity based clusters (red line) have become the dominant architecture in the in the Top 500 Supercomputer sites.
The potential to build large systems with low cost commodity hardware and software building blocks and thus move away from relatively high-cost specialty computer architectures has been a trend for some time. Not all workloads are suitable for such an approach. But the highly parallel nature of many High-Performance Computing (HPC) workloads, where subsets of the computing effort can be run independently of each other on separate processing units, meant this was an area suited to the adoption of this type of technology, and the chart above shows that today, four out five supercomputer installations in the Top 500 employ the cluster architecture.
The TOP500 project was launched in 1993 to provide a basis for tracking and detecting trends in high performance computing. Twice a year, a list of the sites operating the world’s 500 most powerful computer systems is compiled and released. The most recent, the June 2010 update has just occurred. The data for the chart above was compiled from information at the TOP500 website, www.top500.org , which also includes a wealth of detail about the current and past TOP500 supercomputer installations and is worth checking out.
As the chart shows, in the 1990s the dominant architecture was a combination of symmetric multi-processing (SMP), either as standalone systems, or in clusters of big SMPs, defined as Constellations, along with Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) systems. Around the beginning of this century, the rise of the Cluster began, with an inflexion point being reached in late 2003 where the architecture started to dominate the TOP500 list.
Of course, the Top 500 Supercomputers are a very small portion of the overall server marketplace, and one must be careful not to use this to generalize about what is happening in the broader server market segment using this data alone. For example, there are many applications that still work best with vertical SMP style workloads, and where a horizontal cluster approach isn’t suited.
However, it is probably fair to say that growth of the web has created new computing workloads, which are suited to a horizontally scaled approach, such as the front-end web serving and related applications.
So, with conditions ripe for more general horizontal workload applications and the modularization that gains pace, through the Cloud Computing movement, one would expect the commodity cluster architecture to continue to grow in popularity well beyond this supercomputing niche.
For more information on the TOP500, visit www.Top500.org
Are you implementing commercial applications with commodity servers, where in the past you may have used a different architecture? If so, please leave a comment and tell us about your experience.
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