World’s Most Powerful Supercomputers

Twice a year, TOP500 releases a list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. In its latest survey (June 18, 2008), the global high performance computing community has officially entered a new realm—a supercomputer with a peak performance of more than 1 petaflop/s (one quadrillion floating point operations per second).

The fastest systems are:

1. “Roadrunner,” U.S. Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory — Built by IBM and named for the state bird of New Mexico. Achieved 1.026 petaflop/s— making it the first supercomputer to reach this milestone. Roadrunner also proved to be one of the most energy efficient systems on the list.

2. IBM BlueGene/L system at DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Blue Gene/L, with a performance of 478.2 teraflop/s (trillions of floating point operations per second),  held the No.1 position since November 2004.

3. IBM BlueGene/P (450.3 teraflop/s) at DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory

4. Sun SunBlade x6420 “Ranger” system (326 teraflop/s) at the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas – Austin

5. Cray XT4 “Jaguar” (205 teraflop/s) at DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory

6. IBM BlueGene/P system at the Forschungszentrum Juelich (FZJ) in Germany

7. SGI system at the new New Mexico Computing Applications Center (NMCAC) in Rio Rancho, NM.

8. Hewlett-Packard Cluster Platform 3000 BL460c system at the Computational Research Laboratories, a wholly owned subsidiary of Tata Sons Ltd. in Pune, India

9. BlueGene/P system installed at the Institut du Développement et des Ressources en Informatique Scientifique (IDRIS) in France

10. SGI Altix ICE 8200 system at an industrial customer, Total Exploration Production

For more information, visit Top500.