06.27.07 By Scott Ferguson Once again, IBM can lay claim to having the world's fastest supercomputer.
The list of the top 500 supercomputers in the world was released June 27 at the International Supercomputer Conference in Dresden, Germany, with IBM taking top honors for the fourth straight time.
Big Blue, of Armonk, N.Y., built six of the top 10 supercomputers on this year's list. Dell, Cray and Silicon Graphics also were included among the top 10. Unlike last year, when only one of IBM's Blue Gene/L systems cracked 100 teraflops of performance, at least three of the top 10 supercomputers in the 2007 list sped past the 100 teraflop mark.
The top 500 list, which is published twice a year, is compiled by the University of Mannheim, in Germany; the University of Tennessee; and the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center's Lawrence-Berkeley National Laboratory.
"The 29th 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," according to a statement from the three institutions that compile the list.
From the full article at the link immediately above:
"All of the systems on the top 500 list are getting faster. The entry level mark for the list increased from about 2.74 teraflops six months ago to about 4 teraflops now."
"The notion of supercomputers breaking the teraflop barrier might seem obsolete soon. Both IBM and Sun Microsystems said at the show that they are building or will build systems that offer a "petaflop;" or a thousand trillion calculations per second of performance."
From another article linked in the above:
"A 72-rack Blue Gene/P system with 294,912 processing cores will achieve the 1 petaflop of computing performance, Shultz said. A 216-rack cluster offers 3 petaflops of performance. At the ISC, IBM plans on sharing the benchmarks it achieved with a two-rack Blue Gene/P system, which should place the supercomputer at No. 30 on the Top 500 list."