New Top 500 supercomputers list: Blue Gene/L no longer fastest

June 18, 2008 | Source: KurzweilAI

The 31st edition of the TOP500 Supercomputer Sites list was released today.

The IBM-built Los Alamos National Laboratory’s “Roadrunner” tops the list with a performance of more than one petaflop/s (1 quadrillion calculations per second), the first supercomputer to reach this milestone. It is more than twice fast as Blue Gene/L, the previous number one from November 2004 through November 2007.

For the first time, the TOP500 list includes power consumption values for many of the systems. The top 10 systems’ average power efficiency is 248 megaflop/s per Watt, with an average power consumption of 1.3 megawatts.

Six of the top ten systems are in the United States, including the top five (four at U.S. Department of Energy sites). France has two of the top 10, and Germany and India one each.

The last system on the list (9 teraflop/s) is faster than the number one system in November 2001.

The teraflop/s milestone (1 trillion calculations per second) was reached 11 years ago by Intel’s ASCI Red system, and the gigaflop/s milestone (1 billion calculations per second) was reached 22 years ago, by the Cray 2.

The  U.S. Department of Energy and the National Security Agency predict they’ll require exaflop (1000 petaflop/s) computing in 2018.

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