The 31st edition of the semi-annual Top 500 listing of supercomputers in the world was announced this week at the International Supercomputing Conference 2008 event in Dresden, Germany, and the list will be noteworthy for two reasons. First, this will be the first time that a supercomputer of any make, vendor, or architecture has broken through the petaflops performance barrier, a feat accomplished by the “Roadrunner” hybrid Opteron-Cell machine created for the U.S. government’s Los Alamos National Laboratory by IBM. And second, and perhaps foremost, this will be the first ranking where watts are being counted for big machines in a manner that is as consistent as the Linpack Fortran benchmark that is the touchstone for performance.
The Top 500 Super Ranking Now Counts Watts as Well as Flops
June 19, 2008