December 11th, 2007 at 5:24 pm
The
TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful publicly-known
computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and
publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year.
The project aims to provide a reliable basis for tracking and detecting
trends in high-performance computing and bases rankings on Linpack NN
Benchmark, a yardstick of performance that is a reflection of processor
speed and scalability.
Supercomputers are used for highly calculation-intensive tasks such as
problems involving quantum mechanical physics, weather forecasting,
climate research (including research into global warming), molecular
modeling (computing the structures and properties of chemical
compounds, biological macromolecules, polymers, and crystals), physical
simulations (such as simulation of airplanes in wind tunnels,
simulation of the detonation of nuclear weapons, and research into
nuclear fusion), cryptanalysis, and the like. Major universities,
military agencies and scientific research laboratories are heavy users.
The TOP500 ranking of supercomputers is released twice a year by
researchers at the Universities of Tennessee and Mannheim, Germany, and
at NERSC Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The latest list saw
five new entrants into the top 10.
| 1.) BlueGene/L System
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The
BlueGene/L System, jointly developed by IBM and the US Department of
Energy, remains the world’s fastest supercomputer, a record it has held
for the past four years.
The BlueGene/L System has held the No. 1 spot since November 2004. The
current IBM system has been significantly expanded, achieving a Linpack
benchmark performance of 478.2 teraflops.
A teraflop (TFlop/s) equals a trillion calculations per second. Six
months ago, the BlueGene held the top position with 280.6 TFlop/s. |
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| 2.) Jugene
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Making
its first entry in the Top 10 was a newer version of the same type of
IBM system. The BlueGene/P system, called Jugene, debuted at No. 2.
This supercomputer has a peak Linpack benchmark performance of
167.3 teraflops. (The Linpack benchmark is the standard used to measure
the performance of these supercomputers.) The system is installed at
the German computer research center Forschungszentrum Juelich.
Founded in 1956 as the Kernforschungsanlage Julich (nuclear research
institute Julich, short KFA) it was originally focused on nuclear
research. It was the site of three nuclear reactors, all now shut down.
Recent scientific breakthroughs at the research centre include the
discovery of the giant magnetoresistive effect in 1988 (simultaneously
with the Universite de Paris Sud). |
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| 3.) New Mexico Computing Applications Center
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The
No. 3 system is not only new, but also the first system for a new
supercomputing center, the New Mexico Computing Applications Center
(NMCAC) in Rio Rancho, NM. The system, built by SGI and based on the
Altix ICE 8200 model, posted a speed of 126.9 TFlop/s.
One of the world’s largest systems dedicated to non-confidential
projects, the new supercomputer is the largest Altix ICE system
purchased to date, and will fuel scientific and engineering
breakthroughs both for private industry and public research
institutions.
The acquisition is part of an economic growth initiative spearheaded by New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson. |
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| 4.) Tata’s Eka
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For
the first time ever, India placed a system in the Top 10. The
Computational Research Laboratories, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Tata
Sons Ltd in Pune, India, installed a Hewlett-Packard Cluster Platform
3000 BL460c system.
They integrated this system with their own routing technology and achieved 117.9 TFlop/s performance. |
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| 5.) Hewlett-Packard 3000 BL460c System
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The
No.5 system is also a new Hewlett-Packard Cluster Platform 3000 BL460c
system and installed at a Swedish government agency. It was measured at
102.8 TFlop/s.
Hewlett-Packard had the second most supercomputers on the list with
166. HP actually had a few more computers on the list than IBM six
months ago. For most of the past several years, IBM has had the most
computers on the list. |
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| 6.) Red Storm
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At
No. sixth is Red Storm supercomputer, which is installed at Sandia
National Laboratory. Cray Red Storm takes Opteron processors and their
HyperTransport links and marries it to a high-bandwidth, low latency
interconnect called SeaStar designed by Cray to put thousands and
thousands of processors into a single complex.
The XT3, which is the first commercialised product based on
the Red Storm design, was in volume production in early 2005 and was
followed by the XT4 in late 2006 and its upgraded Opterons and
SeaStar-2 interconnect.
Based on Red Storm design, with XT5 family of machines, Cray
is tweaking the blade-style packaging for its compute and I/O blades;
its rival in the HPC market, Silicon Graphics, has also moved to blade
packaging for its Itanium and Xeon clusters with recent designs. |
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| 7.) Cray Jaguar
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At
no. 7 is Cray XT4/XT3 system, called Jaguar, with 101.7 TFlop/s. The
supercomputer is installed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in
Tennessee.
ORNL is a multiprogramme science and technology laboratory managed for
the US Department of Energy. Scientists and engineers at ORNL conduct
basic and applied research and development to create scientific
knowledge and technological solutions that strengthen the country’s
leadership in key areas of science; increase the availability of clean,
abundant energy; restore and protect the environment and contribute to
national security.
ORNL also performs other work for the Department of Energy, including
isotope production, information management, and technical programme
management, and provides research and technical assistance to other
organizations. |
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| 8.) Blue Gene
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Following
the Cray system was IBM’s eServer Blue Gene at the IBM Thomas J Watson
Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY, where it achieved 91.29 TFlop/s.
IBM Thomas J Watson Research Center is the headquarters for the IBM
Research Division — the largest industrial research organisation in
the world with eight labs worldwide. Established in 1961, the Watson
Research Center is located in Westchester County, New York and
Cambridge, Massachusetts and spans three sites and four buildings.
The main laboratory is located in Yorktown Heights, two
buildings in Hawthorne, and one building in Cambridge. An approximate
1,790 people are employed between these four facilities.
The research focuses primarily on IT hardware (ranging from exploratory
work in the physical sciences to semiconductors and systems
technology); software (including areas as diverse as security,
programming, mathematics and speech technologies); and services, with a
focus on applying them to transform businesses in a wide range of
industries. |
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| 9.) Cray XT 4
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At
no. 9 is Cray XT 4 installed at NERSC/LBNL United States. The
next-generation supercomputer is used to advance a broad range of
scientific research. Named Franklin in honor of the first
internationally recognized American scientist, Benjamin Franklin, the
Cray XT4 system enables researchers to tackle the most challenging
problems in science by conducting more frequent and increasingly
detailed simulations and analyses of massive sets of data.
NERSC is the flagship scientific computing facility for the Office of
Science in the US Department of Energy and a world leader in
accelerating scientific discovery through computation. NERSC is located
at Berkeley Lab in Berkeley, California. |
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| 10.) New York Blue
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At
no. 10 is an eServer Blue Gene system, called New York Blue, at the
Stony Brook/BNL, New York Center for Computational Services. The IBM
system measured 82.161 TFlop/s.
The New York Center for Computational Sciences (NYCCS) is a joint
venture of Stony Brook University (SBU) and Brookhaven National
Laboratory (BNL).
The Center was formed in 2007 to foster high performance
massively parallel computing on the whole range of science and
technology topics. Its hardware consists of an 18 rack IBM Blue Gene/L
supercomputer owned by SBU and located at BNL.
New York State, with the leadership of the NYS Assembly, provided funds
for the machine, and NYS and US DOE funds supported renovation of
laboratory space to house it. |
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Via Times of India
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