MOSCOW, Sept. 29 -- The Research Computer Center of Lomonosov Moscow State University and the Interdepartmental Supercomputer Center of RAS have announced release of the 9th edition of the Top50 list of the most powerful computers of Russia and the CIS (former Soviet Union countries). The new edition of the list was announced on Sept. 23 at the All-Russian scientific conference "Scientific service on the Internet: Large-scale problems' solution." T-Platforms maintains the leading positions with respect to the number of systems represented in

The Top500 list is always climbing to new heights. Can we believe the hype?

Every June and November, with fanfare lacking only in actual drum rolls and trumpet blasts, a new list of the world's fastest supercomputers is revealed. Vendors brag, and the media reach for analogies such as "It would take a patient person with a handheld calculator x number of years (think millennia) to do what this hunk of hardware can spit out in one second."

For the first time, the TOP500 list is also providing power consumption values for many of the computing systems and it will continue tracking them in consistent manner. As “name-plate” power ratings can be several times higher than actual consumed power levels, we decided not to report name-plate or peak-power ratings at all and to report measured values only.

MANNHEIM, Germany; BERKELEY, Calif. & KNOXVILLE, Tenn.—With the publication of the latest edition of the TOP500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers today (Wednesday, June 18), the global high performance computing community has officially entered a new realm—a supercomputer with a peak performance of more than 1 petaflop/s (one quadrillion floating point operations per second).

On June 10, IBM announced that LANL Roadrunner supercomputer reached a record-breaking one petaflop -- a quadrillion floating point operations per second -- using the standard Linpack benchmark. It is the first general-purpose computer to reach this milestone. The new performance record represents more than twice the computational power of the reigning TOP500 champ, Lawrence Livermore's Blue Gene/L supercomputer.

With the June 9 announcement that “RoadRunner” is the first system to reach the 1 petaflop/s level, the HPC community is entering a realm of unprecedented computing power.

The Research Computing Centre of the Lomonosov Moscow State University and the Joint Supercomputer Centre of the Russian academy of science announce the release of the 8th edition of the Top 50 list of the most powerful computers in Russia and CIS (former Soviet Union countries).

The submission for the next release of the TOP500 list is now open. The 31st list will be released during the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, Germany during the opening session.

Submission deadline for the 31st release of the TOP500 List is April 15th (23:59 PST). All system reported have to be installed by May 15th.

The 31st list will be released during the Opening Session of the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC’08) in Dresden, Germany. We are curious to see whether the first Petaflop/s system will have made it into the next TOP500. One of the hot candidates certainly is Roadrunner at LANL in Los Alamos, USA.

Hans Meuer looks back over 15 years of supercomputing experience starting with the Mannheim supercomputing statistics in 1986 and then moving forward with the TOP500 project, launched in 1993. Twice a year, a list of the sites operating the world’s 500 most powerful computer systems is compiled and released. The best performance on the Linpack benchmark is used as the measurement for ranking the computer systems.