Evolving supercomputing in the era of big data

A supercomputer is the biggest and most powerful, integrated information-processing system that humankind has devised so far. The supercomputing industry has already begun to address big data workloads in new performance benchmarks. Key among them is an alternative supercomputing benchmark called Graph 500, for which IBM is one of many organizations on the steering committee. Graph 500 is designed to measure supercomputer performance on the search and graph analysis functions at the heart of many leading-edge, big data applications. The metric denominates supercomputer big data performance in gigateps, which are billions of traversed edges per second. They involve searching the graph of connections between every point in a data set. The IBM NUMA-Q architecture shares memory pools efficiently for streamlined parallel processing of data-intensive tasks, such as big data analytics.