IBM dominates the list of Top 500 supercomputers

IBM continues to dominate the list of the world's fastest supercomputers, accounting for 4 positions in the Top 10 supercomputers and more than half of the world's Top 500 supercomputers list.

Blue Gene supercomputer system

Besides Intel's x86 technology, the number of microcomputers running Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) is also gaining more positions in the list of Top 500 fastest computers in the world.

The list of Top 500 fastest supercomputers in the world has just been published yesterday (June 28) at the International Supercomputing Conference held in Germany. This list is the result of a collaborative project between the University of Mannheim (Germany), the University of Tennessee and the National Center for Research in Energy and Computer Science at the Lawrence-Berkeley National Laboratory.

IBM continues to hold the lead of the list with the Blue Gene / L supercomputing system installed in the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Energy Laboratory.

This supercomputing system achieved the Linpack operating index with a processing speed of up to 280.6 teraflops or equivalent to 280.6 trillion calculations per second. Meanwhile, there is no supercomputer system in the Top 500 list that surpassed 100 teraflops. This is also the reason why experts believe that IBM's supercomputing system will continue to dominate the list of Top 500 fastest supercomputers in the world in a while.

IBM's supercomputers accounted for 48.6% of the Top 500 list. Hewlett-Packard took second place with about 30.8%. Sun Microsystems returned to the Top 10 with the No. 7 position thanks to servers running on Opteron processor platform located at GSIC Center of Tokyo Institute of Technology.

There are a total of 24 IBM Blue Gene supercomputers in the Top 500 list.

According to the organizers who created the Top 500 list, while the "subversive" positions at the bottom of the rankings did not occur often, the battle to dominate the top spot was fierce. . Three positions in the Top 10 of the list published in November 2005 have been replaced.

Intel processor products - Xeons and Itaniums chips - are used in 301 supercomputers in this Top 500 list. Meanwhile, Intel AMD's rival may be delighted that its Opteron-based supercomputers have grown from last year's 25 to 81 this year. IBM's Power processor is used in 84 supercomputer systems on this year's list.

The smallest supercomputer system in this year's list also reached 2.03 teraflops - 1.17 teraflops last year.

Hoang Dung