The latest TOP500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers shows five new entrants in the Top 10, which includes sites in the United States, Germany, India and Sweden.
The 30th edition of the TOP500 list was released on Monday at SC07, the international conference on high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis, in Reno, Nevada.
The Top 10 shows five new and one substantially upgraded system with five of these changes placing at the top five positions. The new TOP500 list, as well as the previous 29 lists, can be found on the Web at http://www.top500.org/.
The No. 1 position was again claimed by the BlueGene/L System, a joint development of IBM and the Department of Energy's (DOE) National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and installed at DOE's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif. Although BlueGene/L has occupied the No. 1 position since November 2004, the current system has been significantly expanded and now achieves a Linpack benchmark performance of now 478.2 TFop/s ("teraflops" or trillions of calculations per second), compared to 280.6 TFlop/s six months ago before its upgrade.
At No. 2 is a brand-new first installation of a newer version of the same type of IBM system. It is a BlueGene/P system installed in Germany at the Forschungszentrum Juelich (FZJ) and it achieved performance of 167.3 TFlop/s.
The No. 3 system is not only new, but also the first system for a new supercomputing center, the New Mexico Computing Applications Center (NMCAC) in Rio Rancho, N.M. The system, built by SGI and based on the Altix ICE 8200 model, posted a speed of 126.9 TFlop/s.
For the first time ever, India placed a system in the Top 10. The Computational Research Laboratories, a wholly owned subsidiary of Tata Sons Ltd. in Pune, India, installed a Hewlett-Packard Cluster Platform 3000 BL460c system. They integrated this system with their own innovative routing technology and achieved 117.9 TFlop/s performance.
The No.5 system is also a new Hewlett-Packard Cluster Platform 3000 BL460c system and installed at a Swedish government agency. It was measured at 102.8 TFlop/s.
The last new system in the Top 10, placing No. 9, is a Cray XT4 system installed at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at DOE's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and was ranked based on a Linpack performance of 85.4 TFlop/s.
For quite some time, IBM and Hewlett-Packard have sold the bulk of systems at all performance levels of the TOP500. In the latest list, IBM regained a solid lead in the total number of systems with 232 (46.4 percent) over HP with 166 systems (33.2 percent). IBM, which had been ahead of HP since June 2004, lost the lead in the number of systems six months ago with 38.4 percent (down from 47.2 percent one year ago), compared to HP with 40.6 percent (up from 31.6 percent one year ago).