26th Edition of TOP500 List of World's Fastest Supercomputers
Released: DOE/LLNL BlueGene/L and IBM gain Top Positions
Nov 14, 2005, 07:09
MANNHEIM, Germany; KNOXVILLE, Tenn.; & BERKELEY, Calif.; In
what has become a closely watched event in the world of
high-performance computing, the 26th edition of the TOP500 list of
the world's fastest supercomputers was released today (November 14,
2005) at the Supercomputing Conference (SC05) in Seattle, WA.
The new TOP500 list, as well as the previous 25 lists, can be found
on the Web at http://www.top500.org/.
The No. 1 position was again claimed by the BlueGene/L System, a
joint development of IBM and DOE's National Nuclear Security
Administration (NNSA) and installed at DOE's Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif. BlueGene/L also occupied
the No. 1 position on the last two TOP500 lists. However, the
system was doubled in size during the last six months and reached a
new record Linpack benchmark performance of 280.6 TFlop/s
("teraflops" or trillions of calculations per second). No other
system has yet exceeded the level of 100 TFlop/s and this system is
expected to remain the No. 1 Supercomputer in the world for the
next few editions of the TOP500 list.
The pace of innovation and performance improvements seen at the
very high end of scientific computing shows no sign of slowing
down. This time, four of the TOP10 systems on the June 2005 TOP500
list were displaced by newly installed systems, and the last 221
systems on the list from June 2005 are now too small to be
included.
The new No.3 system, also installed at LLNL, is the ASCI Purple
system, built by IBM and based on their p575 server. It reached
63.4 TFlop/s.
Two new systems at DOE's Sandia National Laboratories captured the
No. 5 and 6 spots, with a Dell PowerEdge-based system slightly
outperforming Cray's Red Storm system. The NEC-built Earth
Simulator, which has a Linpack benchmark performance of 35.86
TFlop/s and had held the No. 1 position for five consecutive TOP500
lists before being replaced by BlueGene/L last November, has
slipped within one year to No. 7.
The No. 10 spot was captured by a Cray's XT3 system at DOE's Oak
Ridge National Laboratory with 20.53 Tflop/s. This is also the new
entry level for the TOP10, up from just under 10 TFlop/s Linpack
performance one year ago.
IBM has now established itself as the dominant vendor of
supercomputers with almost half of the list (43.8 percent) carrying
its label. Also, five of the TOP10 systems are from IBM.
Hewlett-Packard (HP) remains unchallenged at the second position in
this survey with 33.8 percent of all systems.
Intel microprocessors are at the heart of two-thirds (333) of all
500 systems. Intel's new EM64T-based processors are very successful
in the high performance computing (HPC) market place, with 81
systems using them already. AMD's Opteron processors are also
steadily gaining ground, now with 55 systems using them compared to
only 25 systems six months ago.