Comments on the parallelization efficiency of the Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the parallelization efficiency of the Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer using a new figure of merit, showing it excels in parallel efficiency and revealing a Moore-law-like trend in supercomputer parallelization over time.

Contribution

It introduces a new metric for assessing parallelization efficiency and applies it to analyze supercomputers' performance trends over time.

Findings

Sunway TaihuLight has high parallelization efficiency.

A Moore-law-like trend in supercomputing parallelization is observed.

The new metric correlates with supercomputers' performance and power consumption.

Abstract

In the world of supercomputers, the large number of processors requires to minimize the inefficiencies of parallelization, which appear as a sequential part of the program from the point of view of Amdahl's law. The recently suggested new figure of merit is applied to the recently presented supercomputer, and the timeline of "Top 500" supercomputers is scrutinized using the metric. It is demonstrated, that in addition to the computing performance and power consumption, the new supercomputer is also excellent in the efficiency of parallelization. Based on the suggested merit, a "Moore-law" like observation is derived for the timeline of parallelization efficacy of supercomputers.