Supercomputers reach new heights
The 33rd edition of the Top500 list of supercomputers was released this week and while there is still no change at the top of the leader board, Germany and Saudi Arabia have put in a strong showing and the top speed is now well established above 1 petaflop/s.
The Top500 list, updated every six months with details of the world’s most powerful computers, now shows that two of the top 10 positions are held by German-based computers. And just outside the top 10 at position 14 is an IBM BlueGene/P system based in Saudi Arabia.
Holding onto the top spot with 1.105 petaflop/s, or quadrillions of floating point operations per second, is the Roadrunner system at the United States’ Los Alamos National Laboratory. Roadrunner was built by IBM in June last year and is the first machine to break the petaflop/second barrier as well as being one of the most energy efficient systems on the list.
Still in second place is the Cray XT5 Jaguar system installed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Jaguar’s processing power tops out at 1.059 petaflop/s.
While the top two positions are unchanged there is a new contender at position three. The new IBM BlueGene/P system called Jugene is installed at the Forschungszentrum Juelich in Germany and has achieved processing speeds of 825.5 teraflop/s, or trillions of floating point operations per second. Jugene’s theoretical peak performance is just above 1 petaflop/s.
Also at FZJ is Juropa which is built from Bull Novascale and Sun SunBlade x6048 servers and sits at position 10. Juropa has achieved a top speed of 274.8 teraflop/s.
The two German systems, Jugene and Juropa, are the only non-US-based systems in the latest top 10.
Market share
Although Linux-based systems dominate the top 500 list – 443 of the top 500 systems run Linux – the one exception is the Chinese-built Dawning 5000A at the Shanghai Supercomputer Center. At position number 15 it is the largest system running the Microsoft’s Windows HPC 2008 operating system.
The US is the clear leader in HPC systems with 291 of the 500 systems. The European share of 145 systems is still substantially larger than the Asian share of 49 systems.
Trends
Hewlett-Packard kept a narrow lead in market share by total systems from IBM, but IBM still remains ahead by overall installed performance while Cray’s XT systems claim 20% of the top 10. Quad-core processor-based systems have grown quickly and are found in 383 of the top 500 systems. 102 systems are using dual-core processors, and only four systems still use single core processors.
As a measure of how fast processing power is increasing, the last systems on this list would have been listed at position 274 in the previous Top500 just six months ago.
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