Showing posts with label quiz. Show all posts
Showing posts with label quiz. Show all posts

Friday 13 November 2020

Name that supercomputer 2 (Quiz)

It's a long time since I did an HPC quiz, so here is one to keep some fun in these odd times. Can you name these supercomputers?

I'm looking for actual machine names (e.g. 'Fugaku') and the host site (e.g. RIKEN CCS). Bonus points for the machine details (e.g. Fujitsu A64FX).

Submit your guesses or knowledgeable answers either through the comments field below, or to me on twitter (@hpcnotes).

Answers will be revealed once there have been enough guesses to amuse me. Have fun!


  1. Maybe it's Italian style, but this oily system has a purely descriptive name, a bit like the name of a robot with a short circuit.

  2. In spite of the name, this one is a step away from the very top.

  3. The seven daughters of Atlas.

  4. Arising from a beautiful reef, this top supercomputer is named after one of my co-presenters at my SC19 tutorial (or so we think).

  5. This border system's owner often tells how it was renamed in planning due to a bigger newer super that took it's original name.

  6. It has no name, at least not publicly, and the operator has not been open with full details, but with 10,000 GPUs it can do a lot of AI.

  7. On the road to exascale, but not there yet, this system will be housed next year in a chilly northern European location, and shares some similar architecture to two of the first exascale systems.

  8. A chicken with green-ish / brown-ish eyes. Or is it a type of nut?

  9. In a rare move, this number 9 is named after a living scientist, actually one of its users.

  10. Sing a song for this one, because it is named to be hit hard.

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Monday 5 October 2015

HPC Bingo

A big part of SC (Austin in 2015) is actually getting there. Most attendees will have to navigate the joys of long distance air travel. If you travel enough, or play the game wisely, you can secure frequent flyer elite status which helps make the air travel more bearable. Here is a version of elite status bingo for HPC. I listed some categories and "achievements" required for each. Can you claim elite HPC status?

HPC System User category


There have been lots of systems in HPC over the years, but we should stick to options that even a recent recruit to HPC might be able to claim. You can award yourself this category if you have used (logged into and run or compiled code) each of these systems:
  • IBM Power system
  • Cray XT, XE, or XC
  • SGI shared memory system - Origin, Altix or UV
  • x86 cluster
  • A system with any one of Sparc, vector, or ARM, GPU, Phi, or FPGA

HPC Programmer category


Award yourself this category if you have written programs to run on a HPC system in each of these:
  • Fortran 77
  • Fortran 90 or later
  • C
  • MPI
  • OpenMP
  • Any one of CUDA, OpenACC, OpenCL, Python, R, Matlab

HPC Talker/Buzzword category


Buzzwords seem to be an integral part of HPC. To be awarded this category, you must have used each of these in talks (powerpoint etc.) since SC14:
  • Big Data
  • Any of green computing, energy efficient computing, or power aware computing
  • One of my HPC analogies?
  • "it's all about the science" (but then just talked about the HPC like everyone else!!)
  •  Any reference to "FLOPS are free, data movement is hard" or similar
  • Exascale

Tuesday 12 March 2013

Name that supercomputer (Quiz)

Instead of a sensible HPC blog post, how about some fun? Can you name these supercomputers?

I'm looking for actual machine names (e.g. 'Sequoia') and the host site (e.g. LLNL). Bonus points for the funding agency (e.g. DOE NNSA) and the machine type (e.g. IBM BlueGene/Q).

Submit your guesses or knowledgeable answers either through the comments field below, or to me on twitter (@hpcnotes).

For the photos, if you are stuck, you might need to use clues from my twitter stream as to where I have been recently.

Answers will be revealed once there have been enough guesses to amuse me. Have fun!


  1. Which supercomputer are we looking underneath?

  2. Acceptance of this leading system became a HPC news topic recently

  3. NAG provides the Computational Science & Engineering Support Service for this one

  4. One letter is all that’s needed to describe this supercomputer

  5. Racing cattle powered by Greek letters

  6. Spock was one of these

  7. Which supercomputer does this photo show the inner rows of?

  8. Memory with a deerstalker & pipe

  9. Put an end to Ming (or did he)?

  10. This plant/leaf is normally silver when used as the national symbol of this one’s host country