June 2006

The 27th TOP500 List was introduced during the International Supercomputer Conference (ISC2006) in Dresden, Germany.

The No. 1 position was again claimed by the BlueGene/L System, a joint development of IBM and DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and installed at DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif. BlueGene/L also occupied the No. 1 position on the last three TOP500 lists. It has reached a Linpack benchmark performance of 280.6 TFlop/s (“teraflops” or trillions of calculations per second) and still remains the only system ever to exceed the level of 100 TFlop/s. This system is expected to remain the No. 1 Supercomputer in the world for the next few editions of the TOP500 list.

Even as processor frequencies seem to stall the performance improvements of full systems seen at the very high end of scientific computing shows no sign of slowing down. This time the last 158 systems on the list in June 2005 are too small to be included any longer, which represents a lower than average turn-over rate after two record breaking rates in the last lists. However, the growth of average performance remains stable and ahead of Moore’s Law.

TOP 10 Sites for June 2006

For more information about the sites and systems in the list, click on the links or view the complete list.

Rank Site System Cores Rmax (TFlop/s) Rpeak (TFlop/s) Power (kW)
1 DOE/NNSA/LLNL
United States
BlueGene/L - eServer Blue Gene Solution
IBM
131072 280.6 367.0 1433
2 IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center
United States
BGW - eServer Blue Gene Solution
IBM
40960 91.3 114.7 448
3 DOE/NNSA/LLNL
United States
ASC Purple - eServer pSeries p5 575 1.9 GHz
IBM
12208 75.8 92.8 1992
4 NASA/Ames Research Center/NAS
United States
Columbia - SGI Altix 1.5 GHz, Voltaire Infiniband
SGI
10160 51.9 61.0
5 Commissariat a l'Energie Atomique (CEA)
France
Tera-10 - NovaScale 5160, Itanium2 1.6 GHz, Quadrics
Bull SA
8704 42.9 55.7
6 NNSA/Sandia National Laboratories
United States
Thunderbird - PowerEdge 1850, 3.6 GHz, Infiniband
Dell
9024 38.3 65.0
7 GSIC Center, Tokyo Institute of Technology
Japan
TSUBAME Grid Cluster - Sun Fire x4600 Cluster, Opteron 2.4/2.6 GHz, Infiniband
NEC/Sun
10368 38.2 49.9
8 Forschungszentrum Juelich (FZJ)
Germany
JUBL - eServer Blue Gene Solution
IBM
16384 37.3 45.9 179
9 Sandia National Laboratories
United States
Red Storm Cray XT3, 2.0 GHz
Cray Inc.
10880 36.2 43.5
10 Japan Agency for Marine -Earth Science and Technology
Japan
Earth-Simulator
NEC
5120 35.9 41.0 3200