In what has become a closely watched event in the world of high-performance computing, the 26th edition of the TOP500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers was released today at the Supercomputing Conference (SC05) in Seattle, WA.
The No. 1 position was once 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 two TOP500 lists. However, the system was doubled in size during the last six months and reached a new record Linpack benchmark performance of 280.6 TFlop/s ("Teraflops" or trillions of calculations per second). No other system has yet exceeded the level of 100 TFlop/s and this system is expected to remain the No. 1 Supercomputer in the world for the next few editions of the TOP500 list.
The pace of innovation and performance improvements seen at the very high end of scientific computing shows no sign of slowing down. This time, four of the TOP10 systems on the June 2005 TOP500 list were displaced by newly installed systems, and the last 221 systems on the list from June 2005 are now too small to be included.
The new No.3 system, also installed at LLNL, is the ASCI Purple system, built by IBM and based on their p575 server. It reached 63.4 TFlop/s.
Two new systems at DOE's Sandia's National Laboratories captured the No. 5 and 6 spots, with a Dell PowerEdge-based system slightly outperforming Cray's Red Storm system. 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 last November, has slipped within one year to No. 7.
IBM has now established itself as the dominant vendor of supercomputers with almost half of the list (43.8%) carrying its label.
Intel microprocessors are at the heart of two-thirds (333) of all 500 systems. Intel's new EM64T-based processors are very successful in the high performance computing (HPC) market place, with 81 systems using them already. AMD's Opteron processors are also steadily gaining ground, now with 55 systems using them compared to only 25 systems six months ago.
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