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 list (18 systems), followed by Hewlett-Packard (11 systems) and IBM (8 systems).

The 9th Top50 edition has showed further growth of performance of the most powerful computers in the CIS. The total capacity of the represented systems according to Linpack test increased 1.6 times within half year: from 197.1 to 330.1 billion operations per seconds. The amount of new systems in the list (including systems upgraded during the last half year) is 46 percent.

In the 9th edition of the rating, T-Platform managed not only to preserve its previous achievements, but also to set a new record. The real performance of the supercomputer SKIF MSU according to Linpack test amounts to 78.6 percent of the peak one, which is the best efficiency index at the release time among all systems of the first hundred of the TOP500 list based on 4-core Intel Xeon processors. The 26th place in the new rating is occupied by the supercomputer installed in the United Institute of Informatics Problems of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus with real performance amounting to 81.4 percent of the peak one.

The share of systems used in science and education, as well as in industry, has increased (from 29 to 30 and from 5 to 7, respectively), while the number of systems used in financial and research sectors has declined (from 2 to 1 and from 14 to 12, respectively). The majority of systems represented in the rating are, as before, based on the cluster architecture (49 systems). The number of computers with real performance over 1 TFlops has increased (from 25 to 38), and the lower boundary of the first ten with respect to performance has almost doubled: from 5.2 TFlops to 10.3 TFlops. In order to get to the Top50 list, the performance of no less than 737.7 GFlops in the Linpack test is required now.

The number of systems based on Intel processors is growing (from 38 to 40). At the same time, the number of systems based on AMD processors is getting lower (4 instead of 6 in the previous version). The number of solutions based on IBM processors (5) and systems based on HP processors (1) has remained the same. The number of processor cores in the system is increasing: at least 96 in the new edition, while already 14 systems comprise over 1024 cores.

A lesser number of computers use the communication network Gigabit Ethernet for nodes interaction (8 instead of 9), while usage of InfiniBand communication technology increased from 31 to 33 systems at the expense of Myrinet share (from 8 to 6 systems).

About the Top50 Rating

The joint project of ISC and RSS of MSU aimed at making up a rating of the 50 most powerful computers of the CIS was launched in May 2004. The Top50 rating includes 50 the most powerful computing systems installed on the territory of the CIS countries. The systems are ranked according to real performance indices obtained on Linpack tests in compliance with the world standard. The Top50 rating is updated twice a year and allows on-the-fly tracking the tendencies of development of the supercomputer industry in the CIS. The Web site of the rating is: http://www.supercomputers.ru.

About T-Platforms

T-Platforms is the leading Russia-based developer and provider of turn-key solutions for high-performance computing. T-Platforms is the only Russia-based company with five in-house developed solutions featured among the world's mightiest computers in the TOP500 global supercomputer list. T-Platforms proficiency lies indesigning turn-key integrated HW/SW solutions of any performance level, complete with system and third-party software and tailored specifically to meet individual customer needs. T-Platforms offers a wide range of products and services for HPC environments and datacenters, including high-performance cluster systems and shared-memory Linux-based supercomputers, storage solutions, specialized software, computer time and datacenter infrastructure facilities for rent, and other professional services at the company's Cluster Solutions Center.

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Source: T-Platforms