HPCwire: TOP500 List Announced in Hamburg

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June 23, 2009

TOP500 List Announced in Hamburg

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Top two slots on newest TOP500 list of supercomputers unchanged, but new systems in Germany, Saudi Arabia are shaking things up

HAMBURG, Germany, June 23 -- The 33rd edition of the TOP500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers is still led by Roadrunner and Jaguar, but shows that two of the top 10 positions are now claimed by new systems in Germany. The latest listing, announced Tuesday, June 23, at the 2009 International Supercomputing Conference, also includes a brand-new player, an IBM BlueGene/P system at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia, ranked at No. 14.

The closely watched TOP500 list, issued twice a year, both confers bragging rights on research institutions and manufacturers and serves as a valuable tool for tracking trends in supercomputer performance and architectures. The latest list reflects changes from November 2008 to June 2009.

Holding onto the No. 1 spot with 1.105 petaflop/s (quadrillions of floating point operations per second) is the Roadrunner system at DOE's Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) which was built by IBM and in June 2008 became the first system ever to break the petaflop/s Linpack barrier. It still is one of the most energy efficient systems on the TOP500.

Maintaining its hold on second place is the Cray XT5 Jaguar system installed at the DOE's Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Jaguar reached 1.059 petaflop/s shortly after its installation but due to its heavy workload no further measurements were possible.

But in third place, a new contender has emerged-- a new IBM BlueGene/P system called JUGENE and installed at the Forschungszentrum Juelich (FZJ) in Germany. It achieved 825.5 teraflop/s (trillions of floating point operations per second) on the Linpack benchmarks and has a theoretical peak performance of just above 1 petaflop/s. FZJ is also home to the new No. 10 system. Called JUROPA, it is built from Bull Novascale and Sun SunBlade x6048 servers and achieved 274.8 Tflop/s.

The two systems in Germany are the only non-U.S.-based systems in the latest TOP10 list. There are only two other new entries in the TOP10. At No. 6 is a new Cray XT5 system called Kraken and installed at the National Institute for Computational Sciences at the University of Tennessee with a Linpack performance of 463.3 Tflop/s, making it the most powerful university-based system. The other new entry, at No. 9 with 415.7 Tflop/s, is a new IBM BlueGene/P system called Dawn installed at DOE's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Another notable system is the Chinese-built Dawning 5000A at the Shanghai Supercomputer Center at No 15. It is the largest system which can be operated with the Windows HPC 2008 operating system.

The U.S. is clearly the leading consumer of HPC systems with 291 of the 500 systems (unchanged from 291). The European share (145 systems -- down from 151) is settling down after having risen for some time, but is still substantially larger than the Asian share (49 systems -- up from 47).

Energy Efficiency and Other Trends

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