top500

Sequoia, an IBM Blue Gene/Q supercomputer at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, reached 16.32 petaflops, while previous leader K Computer trailed with 10.5 petaflops, according to the Top500 list. The list was published today at the International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg.

The latest edition of the list, which is published twice a year, shows that Intel is slipping and IBM is recapturing lost ground, while the U.S. is back on top after losing its lead three years ago. New technologies reign, from updated IBM chips to a build of Fujitsu's novel interconnect product.

Intel processors … Read more

The rankings of the 10 fastest machines didn't change at all on today's new version of the Top500 supercomputer list, but the top dog cleared the notable performance hurdle of 10 petaflops.

"Flops" stands for floating-point operations per second and is a measure of how fast a supercomputer can perform mathematical calculations using the Linpack benchmark. The K Computer, at the Riken Advanced Institute for Computational Science in Japan, moved up from 8.16 petaflops, the score it used to reach the top of the twice-yearly supercomputer ranking last June, to 10.51 petaflops.

It reached … Read more

For the first time since 2004, a supercomputer built in Japan can claim to be the fastest on earth.

That's according to the Top500 Supercomputing List, which is expected to be released today at the conference in Hamburg, Germany. The new leader, Japan's K Computer, makes its home in Kobe's RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science. K Computer sped to the front of the class by achieving more than 8 quadrillion calculations per second (petaflop/s), which pushed it ahead of last November's winner, the Tianhe-1A at the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin, China, which in … Read more

The Jaguar has fallen from the top of the food chain.

When the Top 500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers is released today, the Cray XT5 system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and run by the University of Tennessee, called "Jaguar," will drop to No. 2 after a year of eating the lunch of every other supercomputer in the world. In its place will stand Tianhe-1A, a system built by China's National University of Defense Technology, located at the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin.

Tianhe-1A achieved a performance level of 2.67 petaflop/s (… Read more

Fujitsu has begun shipping the brains of a new Japanese supercomputer to be built at the government-funded RIKEN research institute and designed to perform 10 quadrillion mathematical calculations per second.

The system, called K, is massive. It's planned to have 800 racks of computing gear housing 80,000 of Fujitsu's SPARC 64 VIIIfx processors running at 2.2GHz, Fujitsu said. The processors will be interconnected with a high-capacity direct-connection network that permits fast communications between neighbors.

Although the system is under construction now, it won't be ready for production use until 2012, Fujitsu said.

The system initially … Read more

The Cray XT5 supercomputer known as "Jaguar" has finally clawed its way to the title of fastest computer in the world.

Sitting back at No. 2 on the Top500 list of supercomputers for more than a year, Jaguar overtook IBM's "Roadrunner" according to the twice-yearly list that will be unveiled Tuesday at the SC09 Conference in Portland, Ore.

Jaguar beat out the competition by showing it can process 1.75 petaflop/s, or quadrillions of floating point operations per second, according to the Top500 Linpack benchmark. IBM's Roadrunner was pushed back to No. 2 … Read more

Correction, 10:38 a.m. PST: This story misidentified the maker of the Power processor. The maker is IBM.

Jaguar vs. Roadrunner. It could be a new Saturday morning cartoon, or a Hollywood franchise to replace an Alien vs. Predator series that surely must have run its course by now.

But no. It is instead a shorthand for the two fastest supercomputers in the world, as reported in the latest Top500 listing, released Monday in conjunction with the SC08 conference in Austin, Texas.

First place went to Roadrunner, an IBM supercomputer at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Its performance in … Read more

Updated 3:12 p.m. to correct the number of the highest ranking Windows cluster

While Windows is ubiquitous on the desktop and well represented in the server racks, until recently it has been nearly absent from the world's largest supercomputers.

Starting several years ago, though, Microsoft made a concerted effort at this part of the market, creating a separate version of Windows solely for computing clusters.

The first big fruits of that effort were evidenced in this year's top 500 list of the world's biggest supercomputers. Five of those on the list were Windows clusters, including … Read more

Good news for green tech: The fastest supercomputer in the world is also one of the most energy efficient. That's according to the Top500 supercomputers list, to be released Wednesday at the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, Germany.

Twice yearly, the list measures the 500 most powerful computer systems available commercially. This year, the 31st time the list has been put together, the honor of top supercomputer goes to IBM's Roadrunner, which is housed at the U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory. It's the first system to reach 1.026 petaflops (1 petaflop … Read more