BlueGene/L is the name of IBM’s latest super computer and now that this year’s Topp500-list is revealed its IBM at the top once again. Already last year it was BlueGene/L at the top with a system developed by IBM and DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and later installed at DOE Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California. The system has doubled its capacity since then and has been clocked at a new record with the testprogram Linpack. The new record is at the very neat 136.8 TFlops/s (trillioner calculations per second).
This system is not complete yet though and will most likely double it capacity once more. Which will really ensure the first place at Topp500. Also at second place we ca find a BlueGene/L system, although a bit smaller, but still managed to perform 91.2 TFlops/s. At third place we find the wellknown supercomputer Columbia that is located at NASA, but this SGI-developed system almost weak in comparison with IBM’s BlueGene/L monster. Columbia can compute up to 51.8 TFlops/s.
There are som quite interesting details on this years list that really shows how fast the development is going and especially the latest decades.
Highlights from the latest Topp500-listan
As predicted several years ago by the research team behind the TOP500 listing, only systems exceeding the 1 TFlop/s mark on the Linpack were qualified to enter the list this time. The system in No. 500 spot reached 1.166 TFlop/s.
The entry level for the TOP10 exceeds 15 TFlop/s and the entry point for the top 100 moved from 2.026 TFlop/s to 3.412 TFlop/s.
Entry level for the TOP500 is now 1.166 TFlop/s, compared to 850.6 GFlop/s six months ago. The last system on the list would have been listed at position 299 in the last TOP500 just six months ago. This exemplifies the continuous rapid turnover of the TOP500.
The last system (#500) in June 2005 has about the same compute power as ALL 500 systems combined, when the list was first created 13 years ago in June1993.
Total combined performance of all 500 systems on the list is now 1.69 PFlop/s (“petaflops” or thousand “teraflops”), compared to 1.127 PFlop/s six months ago.
