World’s Fastest Supercomputers List Released

The 29^th edition of the closely watched TOP500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers shows a lot of shuffling among the top-ranked systems and the largest turnover among list entries in the history of the TOP500 project. The Top500 list, which is published every June and November, was released on June 27, 2007, at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC ’07) in Dresden, Germany. The new list, as well as previous lists, can be found on the Web at www.top500.org. For the fourth straight time, the BlueGene/L System development by IBM and DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and installed at DOE’s

Pubished twice a year, the TOP500 list ranks the 500 most powerful publicly-known computer systems in the world.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, CA, claimed the No. 1 spot. The BlueGene/L reached a Linpack benchmark performance of 280.6 TFlop/s (“teraflops” or trillions of calculations per second). Two other systems exceeded the level of 100 TFlop/s: the upgraded Cray XT4/XT3 at DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, ranked No. 2 with a benchmark performance of 101.7 TFlop/s; and Sandia National Laboratory’s Cray Red Storm system, which ranked third at 101.4 TFlop/s. Two new IBM BlueGene/L systems entered the Top 10, at the New York Center for Computational Science in Stony Brook, NY, (ranked No. 5) and at the Computational Center for Nanotechnology Innovations at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY, (ranked No. 7). These two systems represent the largest supercomputing installations in an academic setting. Also new to the Top 10 is a Dell system at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, ranked No. 8. The fastest supercomputer in Europe is an IBM JS21 cluster at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center in Spain, which ranked No. 9 at 62.63 TFlop/s. Rounding out the Top 10 is a new SGI system installed at the Leibniz Computer Center in Munich, Germany, with performance of 56.52. TFlop/s. The highest ranked Japanese system is located at the Tokyo Institute of Technology and ranks No. 14 on the list. This system is a cluster integrated by NEC based on Sun Fire x4600 with Opteron processors, ClearSpeed accelerators and an InfiniBand interconnect.

Highlights from the 29^th TOP500 list include:

&#149 The performance needed to make it onto the list increased to 4.005 TFlop/s on the Linpack benchmark, compared to 2.737 TFlop/s six months ago. &#149 The system ranked No. 500 on the current list would have held position No. 216 only six months ago when the last list was produced. This is the largest turnover rate between lists in the TOP500 project’s 15-year history. &#149 Total combined performance for all 500 systems reached 4.92 PFlop/s (“petaflops” or thousand “teraflops”), compared to 3.54 PFlop/s six months ago and 2.79 PFlop/s one year ago.