The 32nd edition of the closely watched list of the world’s TOP500 supercomputers has just been issued, with the 1.105 petaflop/s IBM supercomputer at Los Alamos National Laboratory holding on to the top spot it first achieved in June 2008.

The Los Alamos system, nicknamed Roadrunner, was slightly enhanced since June and narrowly fended off a challenge by the Cray XT5 supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory called Jaguar. The system, only the second to break the petaflop/s barrier, posted a top performance of 1.059 petaflop/s in running the Linpack benchmark application. One petaflop/s represents one quadrillion floating point operations per second.

Hans Meuer, Horst Simon, Jack Dongarra and 21 others from the USA and Asia received a special award this year for attending all 21 SC conferences since 1988. The award was given as part of the opening session of SC08 in Austin, TX.

The first SC conference was held in Orlando, FL ( November 14-18, 1988). Hans Meuer is the only European to attend all 21 SC conferences. 

The slides from the TOP500 BOF session are now available for download. The BOF session covered the highlights of the new TOP500 list and issues with the Linpack benchmark and how those can be resolved in the future.

The agenda of the BOF session:

The next TOP500 list will be released Nov. 18th 2008 during the Supercomputing Conference (SC08) in Austin, Texas.

The traditional BoF session will be held on Tuesday, Nov. 18th. See below for details.

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.

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.