News

With the June 9 announcement that “RoadRunner” is the first system to reach the 1 petaflop/s level, the HPC community is entering a realm of unprecedented computing power.

The 31st list will be released during the Opening Session of the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC’08) in Dresden, Germany. We are curious to see whether the first Petaflop/s system will have made it into the next TOP500. One of the hot candidates certainly is Roadrunner at LANL in Los Alamos, USA.

On June 10, IBM announced that LANL Roadrunner supercomputer reached a record-breaking one petaflop -- a quadrillion floating point operations per second -- using the standard Linpack benchmark. It is the first general-purpose computer to reach this milestone. The new performance record represents more than twice the computational power of the reigning TOP500 champ, Lawrence Livermore's Blue Gene/L supercomputer.

The Research Computing Centre of the Lomonosov Moscow State University and the Joint Supercomputer Centre of the Russian academy of science announce the release of the 8th edition of the Top 50 list of the most powerful computers in Russia and CIS (former Soviet Union countries).

The submission for the next release of the TOP500 list is now open. The 31st list will be released during the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, Germany during the opening session.

Submission deadline for the 31st release of the TOP500 List is April 15th (23:59 PST). All system reported have to be installed by May 15th.

Hans Meuer looks back over 15 years of supercomputing experience starting with the Mannheim supercomputing statistics in 1986 and then moving forward with the TOP500 project, launched in 1993. Twice a year, a list of the sites operating the world’s 500 most powerful computer systems is compiled and released. The best performance on the Linpack benchmark is used as the measurement for ranking the computer systems.

The annual Top 100 supercomputers list in china has been released by the Specialty Association of Mathematical & Scientific Software (SAMSS). The list reports on publicly announced computers on the PRC Mainland only.

TOP500 Certificates for entries that made it into the the last list which was released in Reno on November 12th are now available for download.

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.

IBM is looking to bring the first of its Blue Gene/P system supercomputers to North America with an agreement to build a new machine at the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, the company announced Nov. 1.

Argonne is already installing a new Blue Gene/P that is slower than the 445 teraflop model due for installation next year. When the two are combined, they will operate at 556 teraflops. The lab also operates an older Blue Gene/L model that will continue to run separately at 5.7 teraflops.