The new list of fastest supercomputers is out, and IBM has taken the top three spots, closely followed by Intel in the next three places. AMD also makes an appearance in the top 10 with a cluster built on the Opteron processor.
Intel completely dominates the list however, with a 60.4% share, while IBM are stuck in second place with just 16.6% of the supercomputer processor market.
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 three TOP500 lists. It has reached a Linpack benchmark performance of 280.6 TFlop/s ("teraflops" or trillions of calculations per second) and still remains the only system ever to exceed the level of 100 TFlop/s. This system is expected to remain the No. 1 Supercomputer in the world for the next few editions of the TOP500 list.
Even as processor frequencies seem to stall the performance improvements of full systems seen at the very high end of scientific computing shows no sign of slowing down. This time the last 158 systems on the list in June 2005 are too small to be included any longer, which represents a lower than average turn-over rate after two record breaking rates in the last lists. However, the growth of average performance remains stable and ahead of Moore's Law.
View: Top 500 Supercomputers List
News source: Ars Technica
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