Top Two Slots on Newest TOP500 List of Supercomputers Unchanged, but New Systems in Germany, Saudi Arabia are Shaking Things Up

June 23, 2009 | Source: KurzweilAI

The just-announced new annual TOP500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers is still led by IBM’s Roadrunner and Cray’s Jaguar, but in third place, a new contender has emerged: an IBM BlueGene/P system called JUGENE, installed at the Forschungszentrum Juelich (FZJ) in Germany, at 825.5 teraflop/s.

Other notable systems are the Bull-Sun JUROPA at FZJ in Germany, ranked at 274.8 Tflop/s, the IBM BlueGene/P system at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia at No. 14, and the Chinese-built Dawning 5000A at the Shanghai Supercomputer Center at No. 15.

The U.S. still is the leading consumer of HPC systems with 291 of the 500 systems.

As energy efficiency becomes a more critical issue for supercomputing centers, the TOP500 list also now provides data on energy use, expressed as the number of megaflop/s per watt. The most energy efficient supercomputers are based on IBM QS22 Cell processor blades (up to 536 Mflop/watt), but other systems are catching up fast.