IBM BlueGene Ranks Top Supercomputer

The Blue Gene/L supercomputer made by IBM is still 50,000 times more powerful than a home PC.

The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California has the world's most powerful IBM Blue Gene/L supercomputer. An IBM BlueGene/L is still the fastest supercomputer on the planet, but there have been some big changes in the top 10.

The benchmark TOP500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers has just been released at the Supercomputing Conference (SC07) in Reno, Nevada.

The TOP500 number one position was again claimed by the BlueGene/L System, a joint development of IBM and the Department of Energy's (DOE) National Nuclear Security Administration in California continues its reign.

The BlueGene/L, which has recently undergone a significant upgrade, has led the active list since November 2004, and now achieves a jaw-dropping Linpack benchmark performance of 478.2 teraflops, or trillion calculations per second, in comparison to 280.6 TFlop/s in the last list, released six months ago.

India made the top 10 for the first time ever, with Computation Research Laboratories' Hewlett-Packard Cluster Platform 3000 BL640C with 126.9 TFlop/s at number four.

Multi core processors are the dominant architecture, with Intel Clovertown quad core chips now used in 102 systems, contrasted with 19 six months ago. Most other machines utilise dual core processors.

There are 354 systems now using Intel processors, a big increase from 289 systems six months ago. It is the biggest share that Intel has ever had in the 15-year-old rankings.

AMD's Opteron processors have held onto second place, after taking the mark from IBM Power processors six months ago - Power chips are now used in 61 nifty systems, in contrast to 85 on the last list.