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IBM Takes Top Supercomputer Honors Again
IBM Blue Gene takes the crown…again
A system created by IBM and the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore Lab hits 478.2 trillion calculations per second. IBM and the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif., took top supercomputer honors.
The IBM Blue Gene/L system installed at the DOE research facility, runs at 478.2 teraflops or 478.2 trillion calculations per second, earning it the most powerful system on the Top 500 Super Computer list, which is published twice annually by the University of Mannheim, Germany, the University of Tennessee and the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center’s Lawrence-Berkeley National Laboratory. It was released at the International Supercomputer Conference’s in Reno, Nev.
To maintain the top spot, IBM and DOE researchers boosted peak performance increased its peak performance from 280.6 teraflops, with 40 additional server racks added to the Blue Gene/L systems’ 64 racks, each with 1,024 compute nodes that hold 2,048 IBM Power processor cores, said Herb Schultz, marketing manager of IBM’s Deep Computing division.
IBM built four of the top 10 supercomputers on the new list, while Cray built three and Hewlett-Packard built two machines. SGI also built one of the supercomputers listed in the top 10. Overall, IBM built 232 supercomputers on the Top 500 list, while HP built a total of 166 supercomputers.
A total of 354 supercomputer systems—about 64 percent—on the Top 500 list use Intel processors, while 78 systems use processors from Advanced Micro Devices. Another 61 systems use IBM Power processors.
