IBM has been developing 2 prototype supercomputers, one with 8192 processors and one with 4096 processors. Each prototype machine is ranked 4th and 8th in the worlds IBM is aiming for the top spot with its final system. Built with low-power PowerPC processors at a mere 700MHz each and utilising a finely tuned and compiled Linux kernel, the system is intended to be used by a standard Linux install from say SuSE or Red Hat running applications optimized to use the multi-node system.
If IBM succeed they will knock the current supercomputers down a spot. Currently at number one is the Earth Simulator, built by NEC and comprising some 5120 nodes it is hosted in the Earth Simulator Centre, Yokohama, Japan and was built in 2002 it weighs in at 35.8 TeraFlops(35,860 GigaFlops). Second is Thunder, an Intel Itanium2 based system with Quadrics networking and 4096 nodes and achieves 19,940 GigaFlops(19.9 TeraFlops).
IBM is aiming to build a PetaFlop system (1,000 TeraFlops) by next year. Named Blue Gene\L after where it will be finally installed in the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California. The prototypes are already looking promising with speeds ranking them in the Top 10 of the worlds top 500 supercomputers.
IBM totalling over 50% o the rankings with 224 Supercomputing systems in all. HP being the next closest with only 19%.
N.B:
Flop = Floating-Point Operation Per-Second (advanced mathematical calculation)
Giga = Thousand Million ( 1,000,000,000 )
Tera = Million Million. ( 1,000,000,000,000 )
Peta = Thousand Million Million (1,000,000,000,000,000 )
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