BERKELEY, Calif.; KNOXVILLE, Tenn.; and MANNHEIM, Germany (Nov. 14, 2011)—Japan’s “K Computer” maintained its position atop the newest edition of the TOP500 List of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, thanks to a full build-out that makes it four times as powerful as its nearest competitor. Installed at the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science (AICS) in Kobe, Japan, the K Computer it achieved an impressive 10.51 Petaflop/s on the Linpack benchmark using 705,024 SPARC64 processing cores.

IBM has the highest profit, the most patents – and now a woman in charge. Intel is upset about sold processor prototypes and AMD about the lawsuit from a notebook manufacturer.

It's jinxed: A lot of things related to the Bulldozer go wrong, including the joined endeavor of Microsoft and AMD to improve the processor's performance under Windows 7.

Maybe Microsoft boss, Steve Ballmer, will also address various tops and flops of the company in his Keynote at the Consumer Electronics Show CES 2012 – the last of its kind, as, to the surprise of the industry, Microsoft is saying farewell to this show. The list of flops got a little longer in mid-December, with the “update to optimize the performance of AMD Bulldozer CPUs” (KB2592546 ). In the description, Microsoft explains that, until now, the performance of the AMD Bulldozer CPU has been worse than expected.

Once a year, at the International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM), the experts of the craft meet to report on the advancements in transistor, memory and manufacturing technology. Intel is struggling with the C1-step of its newest processors and AMD miscounts.

A new and updated version of the TOP500 iphone application is now available for download from the Apple App Store. This new version adds the latest 2 lists

It's the “worst-kept secret of the industry” – so it was said at Supercomputing 2011 (SC11) – that Intel's Haswell processor will feature transactional memory. Other leaked bits of news concern Intel's Ivy Bridge and AMD's Trinity.

About two years ago, in August 2009, Intel, IBM and Sun founded a “Drafting Group” in order to devise a common specification for transactional memory (TM). All three of them were planning to incorporate this feature into their next processor generations.

To your typical IT organization, the Top500 Supercomputing list released twice a year -- while interesting -- has little bearing on today's operations. Grand proclamations and goals, such as reaching Exaflop performance by 2018, also have little impact on the day-to-day goings-on in most data centers. (As quick background info: A FLOP is the number of FLoating Point Operations performed Per Second; an Exaflop is 10¹⁸ or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 FLOPs.)

by Christof Windeck

The mass layoff at AMD overshadows the launch of the 16-core Interlagos and speculations about cooperation between AMD and ARM are, yet again, circulating. Meanwhile, Intel gives a foretaste of the next Xeons with the Core i7-3900.

From Left to Right: Dr. Hans Meuer, Dr. Jack Dongarra, Corporate Vice President Kenji Ikegai (Fujitsu), Dr. Tadashi Watanabe (RIKEN), Dr. Erich Strohmaier, Dr. Horst Simon

From the Abstract:

"The TOP500 is a treasure trove of information on the leading edge of high performance computing. It was used in the 2008 DARPA Exascale technology report to isolate out the effects of architecture and technology on high performance computing, and lay the groundwork to project how current systems might mature through the coming years. Two particular classes of architectures were identified: "heavy-weight" (based on high end commodity microprocessors) and "lightweight," (primarily BlueGene variants), and projections made on performance, concurrency, memory capacity, and power. This paper updates those projections, and adds a third class of "heterogeneous" architectures (leveraging the emerging class of GPU-like chips) to the mix."

This paper is available for download from the ACM library.

In this podcast, Rich Brueckner and Dan Olds discuss the new TOP500 list with Jack Dongarra and Hans Meuer from TOP500.org. 

Hans and Jack predict that the TOP500 in 2016 will consist entirely of systems running at a Petaflops or more.

A few days before AMD launched its bearer of hope for the server market, the Bulldozer Interlagos, a new strong competitor threw their hat into the ring: ARM.

At the beginning of the year, ARM had stated that it planned to extend the ARM architecture to 64 bits by 2014/15. Now, at ARM's TechCon 2011 in Santa Clara, right where competitor Intel has its headquarters, the British company announced that it's advancing much faster and that the first server processors with 64-bit ARMv8 architecture might become available in 2013. Microsoft has probably exercised quite a bit of pressure.

Seattle, USA – HPC vendors, top system owners and the global HPC community are all anticipating the 38th edition of the TOP500 List, but they will have to wait a few more days. The news is embargoed until 9.a.m., Monday, Nov 14, (EST), when the usual flurry of articles will hit the wires.

Look who has arrived: AMD's Bulldozer. The general enthusiasm, however, is limited, the most frequently used adjective in this context is "disappointing". Nevertheless, numerous data centers count on this new architecture, in Oak Ridge, in Stuttgart and elsewhere.