supercomputer sites

supercomputer sites

A compilation of the 500 most powerful computers and their installations was started in 1993 and is updated twice a year. Intended to detect trends and provide reliable tracking of high-performance computing systems, the list uses the Linpack benchmark to evaluate performance and rank the computers. To view the TOP500 list, which includes system specifications and major application areas, visit www.top500.org.

In 2008, IBM's Roadrunner was the first computer to exceed one petaFLOPS (see Roadrunner). In 2010, the Chinese supercomputer Tianhe-1A claimed the top speed with 2.4 petaFLOPS. Pronounced "tee-awn-hoo-wa" (meaning Milky Way) the Tianhe-1A was built with 14,336 Intel CPUs and 7,168 NVIDIA GPUs (graphics processing units), along with a Chinese-developed interconnect to achieve 2.4 quadrillion floating point calculations per second (FLOPs).

2007 Highlights and Results
The Top 10 sites included five brand new facility locations, including a first for India. Germany, Sweden and the United States hosted other prominent system winners.

An IBM BlueGene/L system claimed the Number 1 spot again, which has been in first place since November 2004. The 2007 winner achieved a Linpack benchmark performance of 478.2 teraFLOPS (TFLOPS), as compared to 280 TFLOPS just six months earlier, before a major upgrade.

The dominant chip architecture is multicore processors. Dual-core processors are also widely found in the TOP500. IBM and HP have sold the majority of the systems in the TOP500.

Intel processors were used in a whopping 70% of the 2007 systems. AMD Opterons came in second place, while IBM POWER chips were third.