In fact, the DEC-10 at Yale did not have enough memory to handle a 100-by-100 system. Notice that almost half of the machines required a second or more to solve the equations. In 1977, we chose = 100 because this was large enough to stress the campus main frames of the day.
With a matrix of order, the megaflop rate for a factorization by Gaussian elimination plus two triangular solves is The hand-written notes shown here are Jack Dongarra's calculation of the megaflop rate, millions of floating point operations per second. With the LINPACK naming conventions, DGEFA stands for Double precision GEneral matrix FActor and DGESL stands for Double precision GEneral matrix SoLve.Īppendix B of the LINPACK Users' Guide has the timing results. We also asked them to measure the time required for two subroutines in the package, DGEFA and DGESL, to solve a 100-by-100 system of simultaneous linear equations.
During the development we asked two dozen universities and laboratories to test the software on a variety of main frame machines that were then available in central computer centers. The LINPACK benchmark is an accidental offspring of the development of the LINPACK software package in the 1970's. Tianhe-2's top speed of 33.86 petaflops on the latest Top500 list is nearly twice as fast as number two Titan from Oak Ridge at 17.59 petaflops and number three Sequoia from Lawrence Livermore at 17.17 petaflops.
The next Supercomputing Conference will be in November in Denver. Last week's conference in Leipzig produced this Top 500 List. They announce their results twice a year at international supercomputing conferences. Since 1993, LINPACK benchmark results have been collected by the Top500 project. The ranking of world's fastest computer is based on the LINPACK Benchmark. Tianhe-2 has 16,000 nodes, each with two Intel Xeon IvyBridge processors and three Xeon Phi processors, for a combined total of 3,120,000 computing cores. The Tianhe-2, also known as the MilkyWay-2, is being built in Gunagzho, China by China's National University of Defense Technology. An announcement made last week at the International Supercomputing Conference in Leipzig, Germany, declared the Tianhe-2 to be the world's fastest computer.