IBM Leads, Intel Gains in Supercomputer Ranking

Six of the top 10 systems are manufactured by IBM, five of which were inspired by Blue Gene technology. Half of the top systems on the November 2004 TOP500 list were displaced by new installs.

In comparison to today's technology, CRAY 1, the word's first supercomputer, reached a top speed of 133 megaflops. A megaflop is equivalent to one million instructions per second; a teraflop is equivalent to a trillion operations per second.

Today, Cray's most powerful supercomputer called Red Storm holds the number 10 spot on the TOP500 list with a preliminary Linpack score of 15.25 Tflops. The Red Storm has not yet been completed, but has been officially benchmarked.

The list has revealed rapid turnover in the sector: For the first time, only machines exceeding the 1 teraflop performance mark made the list with the entry level increasing from 850.6 gigaflops six months ago to 1.166 teraflops. The machine placed last on the list was rated number 299 just six months ago and every machine that was rated 201 or below no longer makes the list.

Quandt explained the high turnover, saying, "The rapid gains in performance on the Top500 list is the result of industry vendors investing research and development resources in semiconductor and interconnect technologies."

Another emerging trend is the presence of 333 Intel processor based systems. The number of machines using the Intel architecture has increased from 320 six months ago and from 287 nearly one year ago. The second most prevalent architecture to occupy the TOP500 is IBM Power processors (77 systems), the third spot belongs to HP's Risc processors (36) and forth is Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), which powers a total of 25 systems.

Lastly, it was found that the United States leads the world in supercomputer installations with 294 of the 500 systems being located on its soil. Europe has the second highest count with 114 systems installed; Japan is home to 23 and all other Asian countries have 58 systems when combined. Germany has taken the lead in Europe away from the United Kingdom with 40 systems and China is closing in on Japan with 19 systems.