TOP500 List of World's Fastest Supercomputers Released

There is a flurry of press releases about microprocessor today, here's another one, In what has become a closely watched event in the world of high-performance computing.

The 26th edition of the TOP500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers was released today (November 14, 2005) at the Supercomputing Conference (SC05) in Seattle, WA.
The No. 1 position was again claimed by the BlueGene/L System, a joint development of IBM and DOE's National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and installed at DOE's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif. BlueGene/L also occupied the No. 1 position on the last two TOP500 lists. However, the system was doubled in size during the last six months and reached a new record Linpack benchmark performance of 280.6 TFlop/s (�teraflops� or trillions of calculations per second). No other system has yet exceeded the level of 100 TFlop/s and this system is expected to remain the No. 1 Supercomputer in the world for the next few editions of the TOP500 list.

Other trends of interest:

A total of 333 systems are now using Intel processors, with 81 one these are already using the new EM64T processors. The second most-commonly used processors are the IBM Power processors (73 systems), ahead of AMD Opteron processors (55).

There are 360 systems now labeled as clusters, making this the most common architecture in the TOP500. Of these, 249 cluster systems are connected using Gigabit Ethernet and 70 system using Myricom�s Myrinet.

IBM remains the clear leader in the TOP500 list with 43.8 percent of systems and 52.8 percent of installed performance. HP is second with 33.8 percent of systems and 18.8 percent of performance.

The U.S. is clearly the leading consumer of HPC systems with 305 of the 500 systems installed there (up from 267 one year ago). The European (100 systems) and Asian share (66 systems) is slowly decreasing.

Press release here.
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