July 10, 2006 (Computerworld) -- The Top500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers, released late last month, showed IBM 's Blue Gene continuing to reign and Advanced Micro Devices Inc.'s Opteron processor powering more systems on the list than last year.
IBM's Blue Gene/L System, used at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, recently reached a Linpack benchmark performance of 280.6 trillion floating-point operations per second (TFLOPS) to easily top the list. No other system has yet passed the 100 TFLOPS mark.
IBM supercomputers accounted for about half of the list, with Hewlett-Packard Co. occupying nearly a third.
The Top500 Supercomputer Sites list is compiled by supercomputing experts Jack Dongarra at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim.
Fewer Changes
The Top500 list, known for its rapid turnover, showed fewer changes than usual this year. Some 158 systems were bumped from the latest list, compared with more than 200 systems displaced in the June 2005 list.
But in the fast-paced world of high-performance supercomputing, no systems maker can rest on its laurels for long.
"The thresholds to get into the top 50 move fast; machines are there one day, gone the next," said Herb Schultz, manager for IBM's Blue Gene. "It's no secret Blue Gene has been in the market for a little while and we're looking at ways to make the chips faster, get more chips on a core and do a faster job of interconnecting nodes," Schultz said.
Among other trends on the list: Intel Corp. microprocessors powered 301 of the systems, down from 333 last year, while AMD's Opteron processors gained some ground by running 81 systems, compared with just 25 one year ago.
Solheim is a reporter for the IDG News Service.
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