NERSC's Franklin Earns Second Place on Graph 500 List

Franklin, a Cray XT4 at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, was ranked No. 2 on the first Graph 500 List, which was unveiled November 17 at the SC10 conference. The list ranks supercomputers based on their performance on data-intensive applications and thus complements the TOP500 list, which is based on the LINPACK benchmark.

Data-intensive supercomputer applications are increasingly important HPC workloads. Current benchmarks and performance metrics do not provide useful information on the suitability of supercomputing systems for data-intensive applications.

Backed by a steering committee of more than 30 international HPC experts from academia, industry and national laboratories, Graph 500 establishes a new set of large-scale benchmarks for these applications. These benchmarks will guide the design of hardware architectures and software systems intended to support such applications and help procurements. Graph algorithms are a core part of many analytics workloads. The Graph 500 benchmark was introduced at the 2010 International Supercomputing Conference held May 30-June 3 in Germany. In future years, the list is expected to rotate between the annual ISC and SC conferences.