In what has become a closely watched event in the world of high-performance computing, the 25th edition of the TOP500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers was released yesterday at the 20th International Supercomputing Conference (ISC2005) in Heidelberg, Germany.
The No. 1 position was again claimed by the BlueGene/L system, a joint development of IBM and National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and installed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California. BlueGene/L also occupied the No. 1 position on the last TOP500 list issued in November 2004. However, the system was doubled in size during the last six months and reached a new record Linpack benchmark performance of 136.8 TFlop/s (teraflops, or trillions of calculations per second). This system, once completed, will again be doubled in size and is expected to remain the number one supercomputer in the world for the next few editions of the TOP500 list.
Erich Strohmaier, one of the founding editors of the TOP500 list said,
"The latest list, particularly if you look at the Top 10, clearly illustrates the dynamic nature of supercomputing today. In just one year, we have seen a dramatic turnover from a ranking topped by the Earth Simulator followed by a number of clusters and two prototypes of IBM's Blue Gene. Today, we see that Blue Gene has gained the first two positions and occupies five of the top 10 slots."
Dave Turek, vice president of Deep Computing at IBM added,
"By giving our clients access to innovative, affordable and flexible supercomputing power like Blue Gene, JS20s and the Deep Computing Capacity on Demand Center, we are providing new resources to drive breakthroughs in business, science and industry. Whether we are talking about improving the accuracy of weather forecasts, designing better automobiles or improving disease research, we are seeing the advent of a new supercomputing age."
The pace of innovation and performance improvements seen at the very high end of scientific computing shows no sign of slowing down. This time, half of the TOP10 systems on the November 2004 TOP500 list were displaced by newly installed systems and the last 201 systems on the list from last November are now too small to be listed any longer.
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