The 29th edition of the TOP500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers shows a lot of shuffling among the top-ranked systems and the largest turnover among list entries in the history of the TOP500 project.

For the fourth straight time, the BlueGene/L System development by IBM and DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and installed at DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif., claimed the No. 1 spot. The BlueGene/L reached a Linpack benchmark performance of 280.6 TFlop/s (trillions of calculations per second).

Two other systems exceeded the level of 100 TFlop/s: the upgraded Cray XT4/XT3 at DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, ranked No. 2 with a benchmark performance of 101.7 TFlop/s; and Sandia National Laboratory’s Cray Red Storm system, which ranked third at 101.4 TFlop/s.

Two new IBM BlueGene/L systems entered the Top 10, at the New York Center for Computational Science in Stony Brook, NY, and at the Computational Center for Nanotechnology Innovations at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY. These two systems represent the largest supercomputing installations in an academic setting. Also new to the Top 10 is a Dell system at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, ranked No. 8.

The fastest supercomputer in Europe is an IBM JS21 cluster at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center in Spain, which ranked No. 9 at 62.63 TFlop/s. Rounding out the Top 10 is a new SGI system installed at the Leibniz Computer Center in Munich, Germany, with performance of 56.52. TFlop/s.

The highest ranked Japanese system is located at the Tokyo Institute of Technology and ranks No. 14 on the list. This system is a cluster integrated by NEC based on Sun Fire x4600 with Opteron processors, ClearSpeed accelerators and an InfiniBand interconnect.

Top 10

1. BlueGene/L - eServer Blue Gene Solution, IBM, DOE/NNSA/LLNL United States, 131072 processors
2. Jaguar - Cray XT4/XT3, Cray Inc., Oak Ridge National Laboratory United States, 23016 processors
3. Red Storm - Sandia/ Cray Red Storm, Opteron 2.4 GHz dual core, Cray Inc., NNSA/Sandia National Laboratories United States, 26544 processors
4. BGW - eServer Blue Gene Solution, IBM, IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center United States, 40960 processors
5. New York Blue - eServer Blue Gene Solution, IBM, Stony Brook/BNL, New York Center for Computional Sciences United States, 36864 processors
6. ASC Purple - eServer pSeries p5 575 1.9 GHz, IBM, DOE/NNSA/LLNL United States, 12208 processors
7. eServer Blue Gene Solution, IBM, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Computional Center for Nanotechnology Innovations United States, 32768 processors
8. Abe - PowerEdge 1955, 2.33 GHz Infiniband, Dell, NCSA United States, 9600 processors
9. MareNostrum - BladeCenter JS21 Cluster, PPC 970, 2.3 GHz, Myrinet, IBM, Barcelona Supercomputing Center Spain, 10240 processors
10. HLRB-II - Altix 4700 1.6 GHz, SGI, Leibniz Rechenzentrum Germany, 9728 processors

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