Visualizing Top500/Green500 Influencers with Exascalar

Visulizing Key Trends

Recall Exascalar is one of the best ways to visualize changes in the Green500 and Top500 lists since it compares both system performance and efficiency in one common analysis. To the extent that performance and efficiency trends are ultimately related, Exascalar enables an overview of population trends.

In this analysis I explore using Exascalar as a visualization tool to look at architectural influencers efficiency and performance. This analysis was suggested in a tweet from the folks at HPC Wire.

Please note: This is a first cut at this analysis. In the future I plan to migrate plotting to ggplot2 and add some interactive features. If you have comments please tweet them to me @WinstonOnEnergy.

November 2014 Exascalar Plot

For reference here is the November 2014 Exascalar Plot.

November 2014 Accelerators versus CPU-only

In this analysis systems with GPUs made by NVidia, PEZY, AMD FirePro and Intel Xeon Phi are highlighted. (Respectful of copyrights).

In all there are 72 systems out of the Top/Green500 highlighted. (14.4%).

November 2012 Accelerators versus CPU-only

For comparison, this is the same analysis for the 2012 Exascalar version of the Top/Green500. Note that significantly fewer GPU systems were in the population.

Systems with GPUs made by NVidia, PEZY, AMD FirePro and Intel Xeon Phi are highlighted. (Respectful of copyrights).

In all there are 54 systems out of the Top/Green500 highlighted. (10.8%).

Intel Xeon

We can also look at other architectural influencers. This analysis looks at which computers rely on Intel Xeon for the CPU. (copyrights respected)

In all there are 425 systems out of the Top/Green500 highlighted. (85%).