Davey Winder
Monday, 17 November 2008 18:05
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The 32nd list of the top 500 supercomputers in the world, based on performance, has been published and Intel is inside an astonishing 379 of them! So, just how fast is the top ten?
These days it is possible to have a
personal supercomputer on your desktop or even a
supercomputer
laptop courtesy of a
PlayStation 3 powered SpursEngine Quad Core HD.
Funny enough, there is a PlayStation 3 link to
the supercomputer at the top of the 500 list, the fastest supercomputer
in the world, the astounding
1.105 petaflop/s IBM RoadRunner based at the
Los Alamos
National Laboratory.
The BladeCenter QS22/LS21 Cluster, PowerXCell 8i 3.2 Ghz / Opteron DC
1.8 GHz , Voltaire Infiniband to be precise, has a PowerXCell 8i 3200
MHz (12.8 GFlops) processor driving it.
The PlayStation 3 connection
being the cell processors which are part of this, more than 12,000 of
them.
This positioning comes as no great surprise, the RoadRunner has held
the top spot since June 2008. However, it only narrowly managed to beat
the Cray XT5 Jaguar supercomputer which can be found at the Oak Ridge
National Laboratory.
Jaguar was only the second supercomputer to break the petaflop/s
barrier with a performance of 1.059 petaflop/s and one of seven of the
top 10 computers to be owned by the US Department of Energy.
The only supercomputer located outside the US to make the top 10 was
the Chinese-built Dawning 5000A at the Shanghai Supercomputer Center.
This holds the record as being the largest system which can be operated
with the Windows HPC 2008 OS.
But when it comes to kudos, they all have to go to Intel. A total of
379 systems, or 75.8 percent of the top 500, are using Intel
processors. What's more, Intel is also powering 49 systems in the top
100. Those using the Xeon quad-core processors are most dominating with
a total of 288 spots.
Do any single-core systems make it into the list, and is IBM still
kicking HP ass when it comes to the vendor race? Find out on page 2...
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