IBM dominates supercomputing list

IBM has regained dominance on a list of the 500 fastest supercomputers and has also landed two unusual prototypes in the top 10.

Of the systems on the latest Top500 list, Big Blue built 224 and Hewlett-Packard built 140, giving IBM back the lead it lost in 2001. Two new systems, ranked No. 4 and No. 8, are prototypes of Blue Gene/L, a system that uses vastly less space and power than its competitors.

IBM calls the prototype systems evidence that its years-long research effort is bearing fruit. But HP, which in 2003 had the most sales in the broader high-performance technical computing market, counters that it had the same number of new systems on the list -- 108 -- as IBM.

The list, released twice a year at supercomputing conferences, is based on a mathematical speed test called Linpack. The top system -- NEC's long-dominant, 5,120-processor Earth Simulator -- can perform 35.8 trillions of calculations per second, or 35.8 teraflops.

Linpack measures one aspect of supercomputer performance, but list organiser Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee is working on a broader suite of tests so a government supercomputing project can gain a better-rounded view. He expects the Top500 to stick with the Linpack yardstick, though.

New arrivals
As with November's Top500 list, there are plenty of new entrants.

The one-teraflop threshold, crossed by 12 systems three years ago, now has been attained by 242 systems.

And the bottom-ranked system on this list was the 242nd six months ago -- record turnover, according to the list organisers at the University of Mannheim, the University of Tennessee and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

As expected, the No. 2 position is held by California Digital's Thunder, a system at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory that boasts 4,096 of Intel's Itanium 2 processors and a speed of 19.9 teraflops.

Also new in the top 10 is an IBM system at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts that features 2,112 Power4 + processors. It ranks sixth with a speed of nine teraflops. Fujitsu's Super Combined Cluster at the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research reached 8.7 teraflops. There's also a Chinese system, the Dawning 4000A, which sports 2,560 Advanced Micro Devices Opteron processors and can manage a speed of eight teraflops.

Missing during this go-around is Apple Computer's System X at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, which soared to the No. 3 position in November then vanished for an upgrade to newer hardware.

AMD's Opteron, which first arrived on the list six months ago, has made substantial inroads with 30 systems on the list.

There also were 30 of IBM's BladeCentres -- chassis that holds many slim "blade" servers. One of them -- a 168-processor system at the Joint Supercomputer Centre in Moscow -- uses IBM's JS20 blades. The JS20 uses the same PowerPC 970 processors that were in the System X.