Thank you to the authors for not calling it the fastest computer in the world :-) and instead, as they should, the most powerful. Clock speed is not the only factor of course, as instruction per cycle and cache sizes have an impact, but for a pure measure of speed, the fastest still is:
For those, the calculations need to included relativistic effects into your algo:-) The Sun gravity affects clock cycles, time relativistic distortions... :-)
Multiplying the number of processors by the clock speed of the processors, and then multiplying that product by the number of floating-point operations the processors can perform in one second, as done for supercomputers FLOPS, does not help me :-)
And why should your algorithm be the benchmark for supercomputer performance, rather than something that is at least somewhat related [1] to the workloads those machines run?
[1] We can of course argue endlessly that HPL is no longer a very representative benchmark for supercomputer workloads, but I digress.
My initial argument since the beginning of this thread, is that it's the most powerful computer not the fastest, as it will not be, for the case for some single threaded task. Not really sure what is so controversial about it...:-)
You say this, but unfortunately I've encountered a few life-scientists who think their single threaded R code will run faster because they've requested 128 cores and 4 GPUs.
I think you're possibly misunderstanding what these supercomputers are for. They just aren't designed for whatever single-threaded workload you personally have, so it's not in scope.
It is clear for me what they are for, and why I would not use it for a single-threaded task.
I was trolling a little bit, the people who downvoted my measure of speed :-) because the millions of FLOPS of a supercomputer, will help for parallel tasks but will not be "faster" for a common use case.
So fastest computer is one thing, most powerful is another.
"fastest" is accurate. You can get more computation work done in less time given an appropriate workload. No matter what adjective you use, "fastest" or "powerful", you're always within a context of an intended workload.
Your argument is a bit like saying the fastest land speed vehicle isn't really the fastest because you can't go to the grocery store with it.
Clock rates of CPUs are not a measure of "speed". Time to solution is the measure of speed. There have historically been computers with lower clock rates with higher rates of results production (larger cache, more work done per cycle).
But those are only proxy variables to explain "performance", or "throughput", or "latency". No doubt, if I wanted a fast single machine, the two configs you showed would both be nice- the former because it's an off-the-shelf part that just "runs stuff faster" than most slower processors, and the latter because it represents the limit of what a person with some infrastructure can do (although, TBH, I'd double check every result the system generated).
Ultimately, however, no system is measured by its clock rate- or by its cache size- or by its MIPS. Because no real workload is truly determined by a simple linear function of those variables.
I guarantee you an FX-8370 isn't even close to being the fastest CPU even at 10 GHz. I bet most desktop CPUs you can buy nowadays will be faster out of the box.
Does it matter? A modern CPU at 5.5ghz will outperform an 8 year old CPU overlocked to 10ghz on just about any reasonable workload even if it’s single threaded.
- For practical use, and non overclocked, the EC12 at 5.5 Ghz: https://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redbooks/pdfs/sg248049.pdf
or
- An AMD FX-8370 floating in Liquid Nitrogen at 8.7 Ghz: https://hwbot.org/benchmark/cpu_frequency/rankings#start=0#i...