IBM Tops List Of Fastest Supercomputers

New to the top 10 was a Dell Abe PowerEdge 1955 system at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois. The system ranked No. 8. The fastest supercomputer in Europe was an IBM JS21 cluster at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center in Spain, which ranked No. 9 at 62.63 teraflops per second. No. 10 was an SGI HLRB-II Altix 4700 system at the Leibniz Computer Center in Munich, Germany. The system has a performance level of 56.52 teraflops per second.

The total combined performance for all 500 systems reached 4.92 petaflops per second, compared to 3.54 petaflops per second in November and 2.79 petaflops per second a year ago. A petaflop equals a thousand teraflops.

Other trends: The number of systems using Intel processors increased slightly from November to 289 from 261. The second most commonly used processors were the Opteron family from Advanced Micro Devices, followed by IBM Power processors. Dual-core processors were the dominant chip architecture, with Intel's Woodcrest chip showing the most growth to 205 systems from 31 in the previous list.

Clusters remained the most common architecture, accounting for 373 systems, or 74.6% of the total.

The United States remained the leading consumer of high-performance computing systems with 281 of the 500 systems. The European share rose to 127 systems from 95 in the previous list. The Asian share fell to 72 from 79. The average age of a system in the Top500 was only 1 year and 2 months.