CHPC’s Lengau hangs-on in the Top500 List
The CHPC’s Lengau supercomputer has placed 496th on the computing comnunity’s Top500 List. The list was announced at the International Supercomputing Conference in Frankfurt, Germany in June 2019.
For the first time, all 500 systems deliver a petaflop or more on the High Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark, with the entry level to the list now at 1.022 petaflops. Lengau has appeared on the Top500 List since her launch in June 2016 and is currently at 1.029 petaflops. In her first appearance in June 2016, she was at number 121.
The Top 500 List lists computers ranked by their performance on the LINPACK benchmark (The LINPACK Benchmarks measure a system’s floating point computing power. Introduced by Jack Dongarra, they measure how fast a computer solves a dense n by n system of linear equations, which is a common task in science and engineering). The list is announced in June and in November each year. With over 32000 cores, Lengau remains one of the fastest computers on the African continent, with a utilisation that averagares at 90%.
Figure 1: Lengau’s utilisation from 14-20 June 2019 shows that usage of the cluster is averaging at 90%, very close to reaching full capacity. Full capacity will result in queues to access processing time on the machine. The dip in the figure can be attributed to the long weekend and public holiday of June 16 2019.
Lengau continues to put the country in the company of leading supercomputing nations. She has over 1500 registered users, 500 of which are actively engaged in over 200 research programmes.