IBM Dominates the Supercomputer Club

IBM and Department of Energy’s joint venture, Blue Gene/L tops the list of fastest 500 supercomputer systems, with a linpack benchmark performance of 136.8 teraflops per second.

"The Blue Gene/L right now has 64,000 processors and it’s going to grow to 130,000 processors. That’s a staggering number. By November, they may have the full machine assembled and it’ll have double the performance that has today." said Jack Dongarra, a computer science professor at the University of Tennessee in the US.

Number 2 spot was also captured by IBM with another Blue Gene system installed at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown.

IBM had the most system on the list with 259 followed by HP with 131. A total of 333 of the top 500 systems were Intel based with IBM Power being the next popular name here.

Moving forward, the list of Top 500 supercomputers, which is released semi-annually, is expected to adjust to emerging trends such as 64-bit and processors. (Several versions of IBM’s Power architecture already boast dual-core implementations. However, processors from Intel and AMD have just recently moved to dual-core.)

Globally, the United States is still by far and away the market leader, with 294 of the top 500 supercomputers, up from 274 in November. Japan had 23 systems, while systems elsewhere in Asia accounted for 58 supercomputers. In Europe, which had 114 of the fastest supercomputers, Germany now has the most systems: 40, compared with the United Kingdom’s 32.

The Top500 list is compiled by Hans Meur of the University of Mannheim, Germany; Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of NER C/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; and Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.