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March 1996
/
Letters
/ Real Performance Peaks
I read "The World's Fastest Computers" (January) with great interest, but I was quite disappointed to see that you have fallen prey to the "peak performance" trap. Peak performance has little relation to what can actually be sustained on a supercomputer. Supercomputers should be presented in terms of classes of applications and their sustained performance. The Intel TF
LOPS, which you tout as the world's fastest, is actually so only on a very small set of applications. For most general-purpose scientific computing applications, a Cray will be faster.
Peter Van Roy
Programming Systems Lab, DFKI
According to Intel, the TFLOPS system operates with a sustained rate of 1 TFLOPS. As stated in the text box on
page 62, this supercomputer will run some very specific research applications for the U.S. Department of Energy. The Cray T3E, pictured on the January cover, is a massively parallel processing (MPP) system capable of 1-TFLOPS operation, and it doesn't require a government grant to own and operate. Presumably it will run many of the applications written for Cray systems over the years. How well these existing commercial applications can be made to exploit its massive parallelism remains to be seen.--Tom Thompson, senior technical editor
Matthew Wilson more...
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Real Performance Peaks
