Top500 Supercomputers

BlueGene/L system, No.1 Supercomputer [Photo courtesy: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL)]

The 29th edition of the TOP500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers was released at the International Supercomputing Conference held in Dresden, Germany. For the fourth straight time, the top spot was occupied by the BlueGene/L system, developed jointly by IBM and Department of Energy (DOE)'s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), and installed at DOE's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California. The BlueGene/L reached a Linpack benchmark performance of 280.6 TFlop/s (“teraflops” or trillions of calculations per second).

While the No. 1 system is still unchallenged, the rest of the TOP10 experienced large changes since November 2006. In this year's list, two other systems exceeded the level of 100 TFlop/s: the upgraded Cray XT4/XT3 at DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, ranked No. 2 with a benchmark performance of 101.7 TFlop/s; and Sandia National Laboratory’s Cray Red Storm system, which ranked 3rd at 101.4 TFlop/s.

Two new BlueGene/L systems entered the TOP10. They are both located in the state of New York and represent the largest academic supercomputer installations. The No. 5 system is installed at Stony Brook, NY at the New York Center for Computational Science (NYCCS). The No. 7 system is at the Rensselaer Polytechnic at the Computational Center for Nanotechnology Innovations (CCNI), Try, NY.

The fastest supercomputer in Europe is an IBM JS21 cluster at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center in Spain, which ranked No. 9 at 62.63 TFlop/s. The highest ranked Japanese system is located at the Tokyo Institute of Technology and ranks No. 14 on the list. This system is a cluster integrated by NEC based on Sun Fire x4600 with Opteron processors, ClearSpeed accelerators and an InfiniBand interconnect.