The number of traversed edges per second (TEPS) that can be performed by a

supercomputer A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second ( FLOPS) instead of million instructions ...

cluster may refer to: Science and technology Astronomy * Cluster (spacecraft), constellation of four European Space Agency spacecraft * Asteroid cluster, a small asteroid family * Cluster II (spacecraft), a European Space Agency mission to study t ...

is a measure of both the communications capabilities and computational power of the machine. This is in contrast to the more standard metric of

floating-point operations per second In computing, floating point operations per second (FLOPS, flops or flop/s) is a measure of computer performance, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations. For such cases, it is a more accurate mea ...

(FLOPS), which does not give any weight to the communication capabilities of the machine. The term first entered usage in 2010 with the advent of

petascale computing Petascale computing refers to computing systems capable of calculating at least 1015 floating point operations per second (1 petaFLOPS). Petascale computing allowed faster processing of traditional supercomputer applications. The first system to ...

, and has since been measured for many of the world's largest supercomputers. In this context, an edge is a connection between two vertices on a

graph Graph may refer to: Mathematics *Graph (discrete mathematics), a structure made of vertices and edges **Graph theory, the study of such graphs and their properties *Graph (topology), a topological space resembling a graph in the sense of discre ...

, and the traversal is the ability of the machine to communicate data between these two points. The standardized

benchmark Benchmark may refer to: Business and economics * Benchmarking, evaluating performance within organizations * Benchmark price * Benchmark (crude oil), oil-specific practices Science and technology * Benchmark (surveying), a point of known elevati ...

associated with

Graph500 The Graph500 is a rating of supercomputer systems, focused on data-intensive loads. The project was announced on International Supercomputing Conference in June 2010. The first list was published at the ACM/IEEE Supercomputing Conference in Novem ...

, as of September, 2011, calls for executing graph generation and search algorithms on graphs as large as 1.1

Petabyte The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable unit ...

. The ability of an application to utilize a supercomputer cluster effectively depends not only on the raw speed of each processor, but also on the communication network. The importance of communication capability varies from application to application, but it is clear that the

LINPACK benchmarks The LINPACK Benchmarks are a measure of a system's floating-point computing power. Introduced by Jack Dongarra, they measure how fast a computer solves a dense ''n'' by ''n'' system of linear equations ''Ax'' = ''b'', which is a commo ...

traditionally used for rating the FLOPS of supercomputers do not require the same communications capability as many scientific applications. Therefore, alternative metrics that characterize the performance of a machine in a more holistic manner may be more relevant for many scientific applications, and may be desirable for making purchasing decisions.

References

Cluster computing Parallel computing Units of temporal rate {{compu-sci-stub

See also

References