30th Edition of TOP500 List of World’s Fastest Supercomputers Released, Big Turnover Among the Top 10 Systems

MANNHEIM, Germany; KNOXVILLE, Tenn.; & BERKELEY, Calif. - The twice-yearly TOP500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers, already a closely watched event in the world of high performance computing, is expected to become an even hotter topic of discussion as the latest list shows five new entrants in the Top 10, which includes sites in the United States, Germany, India and Sweden. The 30th edition of the TOP500 list was released today (Nov. 12, 2007) at SC07, the international conference on high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis, in Reno, Nevada.

The Top 10 shows five new and one substantially upgraded system with five of these changes placing at the top five positions. The new TOP500 list, as well as the previous 29 lists, can be found on the Web at http://www.top500.org/.

The No. 1 position was again claimed by the BlueGene/L System, a joint development of IBM and the Department of Energy's (DOE) National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and installed at DOE's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif. Although BlueGene/L has occupied the No. 1 position since November 2004, the current system has been significantly expanded and now achieves a Linpack benchmark performance of 478.2 TFlop/s ("teraflops" or trillions of calculations per second), compared to 280.6 TFlop/s six months ago before its upgrade.

At No. 2 is a brand-new first installation of a newer version of the same type of IBM system. It is a BlueGene/P system installed in Germany at the Forschungszentrum Juelich (FZJ) and it achieved performance of 167.3 TFlop/s.

The No. 3 system is not only new, but also the first system for a new supercomputing center, the New Mexico Computing Applications Center (NMCAC) in Rio Rancho, N.M. The system, built by SGI and based on the Altix ICE 8200 model, posted a speed of 126.9 TFlop/s.

For the first time ever, India placed a system in the Top 10. The Computational Research Laboratories, a wholly owned subsidiary of Tata Sons Ltd. in Pune, India, installed a Hewlett-Packard Cluster Platform 3000 BL460c system. They integrated this system with their own innovative routing technology and achieved 117.9 TFlop/s performance.

The No.5 system is also a new Hewlett-Packard Cluster Platform 3000 BL460c system and installed at a Swedish government agency. It was measured at 102.8 TFlop/s.

The last new system in the Top 10, placing No. 9, is a Cray XT4 system installed at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at DOE's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and was ranked based on a Linpack performance of 85.4 TFlop/s.

For quite some time, IBM and Hewlett-Packard have sold the bulk of systems at all performance levels of the TOP500. In the latest list, IBM regained a solid lead in the total number of systems with 232 (46.4 percent) over HP with 166 systems (33.2 percent). IBM, which had been ahead of HP since June 2004, lost the lead in the number of systems six months ago with 38.4 percent (down from 47.2 percent one year ago), compared to HP with 40.6 percent (up from 31.6 percent one year ago).

Here are some highlights from the latest list:

The entry level to the list - No. 500 - moved up to 5.9 TFlop/s, running the Linpack benchmark, compared to 4.0 TFlop/s six months ago. The last system on the 30th list would have been listed at position 255 in the 29th TOP500 just six months ago. This turnover rate is above average.

Total combined performance of all 500 systems has grown to 6.97 PFlop/s (petaflops, or quadrillions of calculations per second) compared to 4.92 PFlop/s six months ago and 3.54 PFlop/s one year ago.

The entry point for the top 100 increased in six months from 9.29 TFlop/s to 12.97 TFlop/s.

Multi core processors are the dominant chip architecture. The most impressive growth showed the number of systems using the Intel Clovertown quad core chips which grew in six months from 19 to 102 systems. The majority of remaining systems uses dual core processors.

Other trends of interest:

A total of 354 systems (70.8 percent) now use Intel processors. This is up from six months ago (289 systems, 57.8 percent) and represents the largest share for Intel chips in the TOP500 ever. The AMD Opteron family, which passed the IBM Power processors a year ago, remained the second most common processor family with 78 systems (15.6 percent), down from 105 systems (21 percent) six months ago. 61 systems (12.2 percent) use IBM Power processors, down from 85 systems (17 percent) six months ago.

A total of 406 systems are labeled as clusters, making this the most common architecture in the TOP500 with a stable share of 81.2 percent.

Gigabit Ethernet is still the most-used internal system interconnect technology (270 systems) due to its widespread use by industrial customers, followed by InfiniBand technology with 121 systems.

The U.S. is clearly the leading consumer of HPC systems with 284 of the 500 systems. The European share (149 systems - up from 127) is still rising and is again larger then the Asian share (58 - down from 72 systems).

Dominant countries in Asia are Japan with 20 systems (down from 23), Taiwan with 11 (up from 10), China with 10 systems (down from 13), and India with nine systems (up from eight).

In Europe, UK has established itself as the No. 1 with 48 systems (43 six months ago). Germany has to live with the No. 2 spot with 31 systems (24 six months ago).

The TOP500 list is compiled by Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim, Germany; Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of NERSC/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; and Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.