NEWS BRIEFS
Mannheim, GERMANY — The 16th edition of the TOP500 list of the most powerful Supercomputers, compiled by Hans Meuer, Erich Strohmaier, Jack Dongarra, and Horst D. Simon released in time for SC2000 sees IBM establish itself as current leader of this list.
After IBM became the leader in the TOP500, IBM is now able to gain a share of 43% with respect to the number of installed systems as well as installed performance up from 29% only 6 months ago. Second in the number of systems is Sun with 18% while Cray Inc. is holding on to the number 2 spot in performance with 16%.
US DOE ASCI systems are claiming the first four positions of the TOP500. The new IBM ASCI White system at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is the new number one with 4.9 TFlop/s Linpack performance. This system is built with 512 nodes, each of which contains 16 IBM Power3 processors using a shared memory. This type of hierarchical architecture is more and more common for systems used in HPC.
In addition to the four DOE ASCI systems there are now three more systems exceeding the 1 TFlop/s level on the Linpack benchmark (2 built by IBM and 1 by Hitachi). The TOP500 already contains 18 systems exceeding 1 TFlop/s peak performance. One of these systems is in commercial use. It is an IBM SP system at position 15 installed at Charles Schwab.
The list exhibits an unbroken growth at all ranges of performance. 231 systems fell off the TOP500 since last June due to the increase in the entry level. The last entry of the TOP500 list shows now a performance rate of 55.1 GFlop/s compared to 43.82 GFlop/s 6 months ago and 33.09 GFlop/s in November 1999.
All remaining vector systems on the TOP500 are built by Japanese manufacturers. These are 23 NEC SX system, 17 Fujitsu VPP systems, and 10 Hitachi SR8000 pseudo-vector systems. The NEC SX systems are also the only remaining systems with physically flat shared memory.
The number of “Clusters” built with commodity parts and small SMP nodes with less then 16 processors is on the rise with now 28 such systems listed compared to only 7 one year ago. These systems include clusters of Compaq AlphaServer, Sun HPC systems, the IBM PC based LosLobos cluster, and 7 self-made clusters built with Alpha or Intel based PCs.
A detailed analysis of the new TOP500 and current plans for further improvements of this project will be presented at the SC2000 in the traditional BOF session in Room D263-265 at 5:30 PM on Wednesday, November 8.
The new TOP500 list, as well as the former lists, are available at http://www.top500.org/ .
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