27th Edition of TOP500 List of World’s Fastest Supercomputers Released

DOE/LLNL BlueGene/L and IBM gain Top Positions

MANNHEIM, Germany; KNOXVILLE, Tenn.; & – BERKELEY, Calif.; In what has become a closely watched event in the world of high-performance computing, the 27th edition of the TOP500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers was released today (June 28, 2006) at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC2006) in Dresden, Germany..

The new TOP500 list, as well as the previous 26 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 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.

Three of the TOP10 systems on the November 2005 TOP500 list were displaced by newly installed systems. The largest system in Europe is the new No. 5 at the Commissariat a l'Energie Atomique (CEA) in France. It is an Itanium based NovaScale 5160 system build by the French company Bull with 8704 processors and a Quadrics interconnect.

The largest system in Japan, a cluster integrated by NEC based on Sun Fire X64 with Opteron processors and an Infiniband interconnect, is installed at the Tokyo Institute of Technology and gained the No. 7 spot.

The German Forschungszentrum Juelich (FZJ) got to No. 8 with its new BlueGene system, which is now the second largest system in Europe. It is also the largest BlueGene system outside the US and the third largest in general.

The NEC-built Earth Simulator, which has a Linpack benchmark performance of 35.86 TFlop/s and had held the No. 1 position for five consecutive TOP500 lists before being replaced by BlueGene/L in November of 2004, has slipped now to already No. 10.

IBM remains the dominant vendor of supercomputers with almost half of the list (48.6 percent) carrying its label. Also, four of the TOP10 systems are from IBM. Hewlett-Packard (HP) remains unchallenged at the second position in this survey with 30.8 percent of all systems.

Intel microprocessors are at the heart of 301 of all 500 systems. Intel’s EM64T-based processors are very successful in the high performance computing (HPC) market place, with 118 systems using them already. AMD’s Opteron processors are also steadily and rapidly gaining ground, now with 81 systems using them compared to only 25 systems one year ago.

The U.S. is clearly the leading consumer of HPC systems with 298 of the 500 systems installed there. The European share continues to decline with now 83 systems down from 100 six month ago, while Asia mounted a turn-around with now 93 systems up from 66 six month ago.

Here are some highlights from the newest Top 500:

Only systems exceeding the 2.03 TFlop/s mark on the Linpack benchmark were qualified to make the list this time, compared to 1.17 TFlop/s one year ago. The last system on the latest list was listed at position 183 just one year ago.

The entry level for the TOP10 exceeds 35 TFlop/s and the entry point for the top 100 moved from 3.41 TFlop/s one year ago to 4.71 TFlop/s.
Total combined performance of all 500 systems on the list is now 2.79 PFlop/s (“petaflops” or thousand “teraflops”), compared to 1.69 PFlop/s one year ago.

Other trends of interest:

A total of 301 systems are now using Intel processors, with 118 one these are already using the EM64T processors. The second most-commonly used processors are the IBM Power processors (84 systems), just ahead of AMD Opteron processors (81).

There are 365 systems labeled as clusters, making this the most common architecture in the TOP500. Of these, 255 cluster systems are connected using Gigabit Ethernet and 87 system using Myricom’s Myrinet.

At present, IBM and Hewlett-Packard sell the bulk of systems at all performance levels of the TOP500. IBM remains the clear leader in the TOP500 list with 48.6 percent of systems and 54.3 percent of installed performance. HP is second with 30.8 percent of systems and 17.5 percent of performance. No other manufacturer is able to capture more than 5 percent in any category.The U.S. is clearly the leading consumer of HPC systems with 298 of the 500 systems installed there (up from 267 one year ago). The European is slightly decreasing to 83 systems while the Asian share is increasing to 93 systems, which puts it ahead of Europe again.Dominant countries in Asia are Japan with 29 systems and China almost equal with 28 systems.

In Europe, Germany (17 systems) lost further ground with the UK clearly ahead again (35 systems). One year ago Germany was in the lead with 40, compared to UK’s 32 systems.

The TOP500 list is compiled by Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim, Germany; and Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of NERSC/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; and Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.