TOP500 Lists World’s Fastest Supercomputer : BlueGene/L

The TOP500 project tracks trends in high-performance computing by publishing a twice yearly list of the sites operating the 500 most powerful computer systems. The best performance on the Linpack benchmark is used as performance measure for ranking the computer systems.

The 27th edition of the TOP500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers was released today at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC2006) in Dresden, Germany.

“The No. 1 position was again claimed by the BlueGene/L System, a joint development of IBM and DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and installed at DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif. BlueGene/L also occupied the No. 1 position on the last three TOP500 lists. It has reached a Linpack benchmark performance of 280.6 TFlop/s (“teraflops” or trillions of calculations per second) and still remains the only system ever to exceed the level of 100 TFlop/s. This system is expected to remain the No. 1 Supercomputer in the world for the next few editions of the TOP500 list.”

So BlueGene/L System is the world’s fastest supercomputer. They go on to reveal that IBM remains the dominant vendor of supercomputers (48.6 percent) with four of the TOP10 systems. Hewlett-Packard (HP) remains unchallenged at the second position in this survey with 30.8 percent of all systems. Intel microprocessors are at the heart of 301 of all 500 systems.