Top500 Supercomputers

BlueGene/L system, No.1 Supercomputer
[Photo courtsey: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL)]









Last week the 27th edition of the TOP500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers was released at the International Supercomputing Conference held in Dresden, Germany.

The top spot was occupied by the BlueGene/L system, developed jointly by IBM and DOE's National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), and installed at DOE's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. BlueGene/L has occupied the number one position of the last three TOP500 lists. It has reached a performance speed of 280.6Teraflops (trillions of calculations per second) and is still the only system ever to exceed 100Teraflops.

The list is dominated by IBM with 48.6% of the 500 systems listed, and 4 of the top 10, supplied by the company. Processors from Intel power more than 300 of the supercomputers in the TOP500.

One sad note before we end this posting. Sandia's ASCI Red supercomputer, a stalwart of the TOP500 for an unprecedented nine years, is being decommissioned. ASCI Red was the first computer to reach 1Teraflop performance in 1996, and was rated as the fastest computer in the world for four years. During its operation the NNSA used ASCI Red for its advanced simulation and computing research programme, helping to evaluate the safety of America's nuclear arsenal.