The list of the 500 fastest supercomputers, Top 500, is updated twice a year. The list for June 2009 contains a lot of interesting information and it turns out that most processor manufacturers have had a good year, one way or another. AMD brags about having the most processors among the 20 and 25 fastest systems on the list where both Roadrunner and Jaguar, ranked 1st and 2nd, use AMD Opteron processors. AMD’s six-core Istanbul processor has already appeared in two supercomputers from Cray.
Roadrunner is built by IBM that boost the highest rated performance of this list. IBM can brag about having built five of the ten fastest supercomputers and a total rated performance of 22.6 petaflops.
Petaflops performance have been a magic number for supercomputers but nowadays more than a couple of systems are able to reach over or at least near Petaflops performance. Even if Roadrunner and Jaguar are the only systems breaking 1 Petaflops there will most likely be some more in six months when the next Top 500 list is released.
Processor giant Intel showed that it is the market’s biggest processor manufacturer by having processors in no less than 399 of 500 systems. An increase from last year with 379 systems.
More details on the fastest computers of the year can be found at Top 500.
