Intel Inside 379 of fastest 500 computers on planet

Davey Winder
Monday, 17 November 2008 17:05

Your IT - Home IT

Generally speaking, quad-core is king here. 336 systems on the list are using them compared to 153 using dual-core processors, while only four are still in the single core dark ages.

Perhaps surprisingly, seven systems are using those nine core Sony PlayStation 3 processors we mentioned at the start of this piece.

It isn't just the hardware that Intel can boast of in the list, it is also responsible for HPC software tools which are being used by around 75 percent of the listed systems as well.

Kirk Skaugen, vice president and general manager of Intel's Server Platforms Group says "With our multi-core innovation powering so many systems on the TOP500, it's clear that Intel is committed to pushing the boundaries of supercomputing."

Behind Intel, IBM Power processors and the AMD Opteron family are neck and neck on 60 and 59 systems respectively.

When it comes to vendors, HP has overtaken IBM with 209 systems (41.8 percent) compared to 188 (37.6 percent) which is a big change from just six months ago when IBM had 42 percent and HP 36.6 percent.

The top 10 comprises of:

1. IBM RoadRunner (1.105 petaflop/s)
2. Cray Jaguar XT5 (1.059 petaflop/s)
3. SGI Altix Pleiades (487 teraflop/s)
4. IBM BlueGene/L (478.2 teraflop/s)
5. IBM BlueGene/P  (450.3 teraflop/s)
6. Sun Ranger(433.2 teraflop/s)
7. Cray Franklin (266.3 teraflop/s)
8. Cray Jaguar XT4 (205 teraflop/s)
9. Cray Red Storm (204.2 teraflop/s)
10. Dawning 5000A (180.6 teraflop/s)

The Top500 Supercomputer list can be found, in full, here .