Roadrunner has topped the Top500 supercomputers list to be released Wednesday at the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, Germany.
Roadrunner, the world's fastest supercomputer, can perform one thousand trillion calculations per second.
Twice yearly, the list measures the 500 most powerful computer systems available commercially. This year, the 31st time the list has been put together, the honor of top supercomputer goes to IBM's Roadrunner, which is housed at the US Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory. It's the first system to reach 1.026 petaflops — one petaflop is equal to a quadrillion, or one thousand trillion, calculations per second.
For perspective, last year's most powerful computer, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's BlueGene/L — also made by IBM — reached 208.6 teraflops. This year that computer ranked number two, reaching a maximum processing speed of 478.2 teraflops.
The fastest supercomputer in the world — used to monitor the US nuclear weapons stockpile — is really just a PlayStation 3 on steroids. Roadrunner is based on the IBM QS22 blades, which are built using advanced versions of the Cell processor in Sony's PS3. It also runs using x86 chips from Advanced Micro Devices, making it the world's first hybrid supercomputer.
In total, Roadrunner takes up 278 refrigerator-size server racks, and connects 6,562 dual-core AMD Opteron and 12,240 Cell chips.
IBM, which continues its dominance of supercomputing, makes 210 of the 500 systems, including five of the top ten. Hewlett-Packard is close behind, however. HP makes 183 of the fastest computers, including the number eight fastest system known as EKA, located in Computational Research Laboratories' data center in Pune, India.
Rounding out the top ten is Sun Microsystem's Ranger at number four, Cray's Jaguar at number five, SGI's Encanto at number seven, and SGI's Altix at number ten.
On the processor side, Intel dominates the high-end market with 75 per cent of all systems on the list and 90 per cent of the quad-core based systems that were ranked.
Supercomputing, which pits the highest-end machines against challenges such as forecasting the global climate in coming decades or finding oil reservoirs underground, is a fast-changing field. The Top500 list once again had the most turnover compared with the preceding list, according to the researchers who compile it.
The main measurement used in compiling the list is the Linpack measurement, which puts each system through its paces by having to solve a dense system of linear equations.
The Top500 acknowledges that Linpack isn't a complete test of system performance, but it's a way to test for performance on a similar problem across each system. The need for a more complete benchmarking system has been under discussion for several years.
Some additional interesting statistics about the June 2008 list:
- Quad-core processors are used in just over half of the systems.
- The bulk of the systems — 208 of the 500 — contain between 2,049 and 4,096 processors. That's more than double the systems that used that amount just six months ago.
- Four of the top five computers — numbers one, two, three, and five — are located in US Department of Energy labs.
- The US continues to be home to the most computing power in the world. Just over half of the systems — 257 — are located in the US The UK is next with 53, followed by Germany with 46, France with 34, Japan with 22, and China with 12.
- After "not specified," the most popular application area for these superfast computers is finance — 15.2 per cent of the list, followed by research — 10 per cent, geophysics — 9.8 per cent, information service — 6.2 per cent, and service — 5.2 per cent.
